


we are not history yet

by Makari Crow (Beanna)



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Fae AU, M/M, Pre-slash I guess?, Slow Burn, a whole lot of sleep deprivation and paranoia on laurent's part, attracted to each other but too busy to do something useful about it, captive prince reverse big bang 2019, enemies to respected companions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:21:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22023262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beanna/pseuds/Makari%20Crow
Summary: Entry for the 2019 Captive Prince Reverse Big Bang. Prompt - Fae AU.Laurent has an impossible quest and the only help he can count on is the human pet. You know, the one who used to be a prince among the humans. The one who murdered Laurent's older brother.They are unlikely allies, but right now, each the only option the other has.
Relationships: Damen/Laurent (Captive Prince)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 46
Collections: Captive Prince Reverse Bang 2019





	we are not history yet

**Author's Note:**

> [Here](https://yankihachi.tumblr.com/post/189974016830/) is the wonderful art done by yankihachi, and which this piece was based on! 
> 
> Please be aware of canon-typical abuse levels involving the Regent, even if I have been somewhat vaguer than canon. Also includes minor body horror, instances of unreality, and minor but explicit injuries. Cheers, all!

There are other courts than this one, but Summer is the closest to the things humans yearn for, and so naturally the one that borders the human lands. Laurent doesn't think the human really appreciates how close it truly is, unfortunately, judging by the flat look on his face. It's true that the path laid out before them seems to stretch on an infinity, a half-complete dirt road wending through civilized gold wheat-fields half overrun with the green of creeping vines and the rampant, uncontrolled growth of wild plain-grasses. But: the human should know by now such beauties in these lands always have something more under them.

The human. No— _Damen_. His human, now, claimed by blood and life-debt and blows stayed. It's too dangerous, now, to keep the distance. Laurent is no longer in a position where he can afford to turn down help he doesn't care for the source of. So Damen he is.

( _Damianos_ , Laurent thinks, and puts it away, folds it into the frozen seed of his heart to nestle next to a boy's grief.)

"If you stare at it long enough, it might start to overgrow you, too," Laurent says, something sharp creeping out even where he doesn't mean it to. This, too, is dangerous: the way Damen rattles Laurent's hard and fast control, simply by standing there and looking muscularly oblivious.

Damen looks at him, measuringly, and then lowers his head a fraction. He's a poor pretender, can't even satisfactorily falsify subservience. "I wondered how far it went," he says then, by way of explanation. "And how far you had said it was to the border."

"Threescore miles and ten," Laurent says, and rolls his eyes. "Or eight, and eight, and eight... As these things go."

There's a question being looked at him. Laurent firms his posture back to the straight-backed sword it should be and steps out of the last vestige of safe ground, dwelling-ground, out into the wild among the fields. If Damen has any sense at all, he'll follow rather than be left alone in fae lands, _again_.

Under Laurent's bare feet, the dirt tells him stories, some of which are guaranteed to be utter falsehood. It says that out in the rolling grasses there are serpents large enough to swallow a man whole; it says that behind Laurent are the footsteps of a human man of dense muscle and excessive height; it says that someday the stubborn and green and growing will overcome all in verdant reign, and under it all will be the dirt, the earth, the hard-packed soil which gives life to all.

Well. Two out of three isn't bad.

"Seventy and twenty-four aren't nearly the same thing," Damen says, persistent from just behind and to Laurent's right.

The space between Laurent's shoulderblades itches with his presence, just at the corner of vision, but he refuses to hunch up his shoulders or otherwise make any concession to the feeling. "It was a rhyme, once," Laurent says, distracted, keeping mental track of Damen's footsteps in an effort to sate his own wariness. One, two, three, four. "The story carries more weight than the reality. How many miles to Delfeur..."

His throat closes up on memory: Auguste, passing down the old stories, the songs that live only where they pass from parent to child, sibling to sibling. No. Laurent is generous, but not _that_ generous. The human doesn't get these. He gets his life, and his form, and his sanity, and that should be enough for any man to be contented with.

"It's one I've never heard," Damen says, and, "It must be of your people?"

Even now, he steps around the name. Hah. "That would be the reasonable conclusion," Laurent says, and keeps walking. Overhead, the sun beats bright down against their shoulders -- Laurent's armored in blue silk, Damen's marked by crossed leather straps over thin linen. The path cuts curves through the golden wheat, rises up slowly and down again. Spidery, wild grass-roots, far less civilized than _crops_ , encroach on the edges of the path, not fast enough for the eye to see at once, seen clearly if one looks twice.

Enough that Laurent knows the little bare dirt there is will grow narrower and narrower as they go.

In an hour, perhaps two, they'll have nothing but the field; and after that, the vines. The places behind them are gone, Laurent knows without looking, and he is not in the habit of looking back. But it would be well if they found something on the other side of the gold and green before they are swallowed up by it.

The wild wants what it wants, and even its children are not immune.

* * *

Winter had gone by the time the human came to their court. Spring filled the air with pollen, added bright green buds to every plant, as well as some things that weren’t strictly plants but liked to get into the rhythm of the season anyway. It had been told like this: the man had stumbled into one of those places near the border where the wild and the mortal flex through each other, a circle of trees or a boundary of stones or a doorway left to stand free and overgrown in a field. Does it really matter, which one?

Humans take such tumbles accidentally, and rarely return again to their own lands. They’re fun to keep as pets, if you’re into that kind of thing, but they burn quick and bright, and they always carry so much iron. 

This one — _Damianos_ — had a sword to hand, an ugly black-wrought thing that burned cold, but he had been too disoriented to keep it raised. Perhaps the shift from mortal to Summer had been just that overwhelming for him; perhaps he’d been drugged or drunk. Did it matter? An oak tree had collaborated with one of the soldiers of the court to bind him in wood and ivy, and deliver him to the Regent of the Summer Court, the one who has been waiting for Laurent to be ready to rule.

However the Regent chooses to define that lately.

Laurent remembers pieces of the day with pain-stamped clarity: dark, hazy eyes under untidy curls, broad shoulders striped with blood and ivy, the distant startled sound as the human is forced to his knees. He does not know the face, not _quite_ , but he knows he hates it anyway, and knows his uncle looks far too pleased about the delivery for this to be any true stroke of luck. “Didn’t you once like humans, nephew?” his uncle had asked of him then.

There had been no good way to answer; Laurent had turned his head to a different angle, to give the appearance of a lazier interest, and given the truth. “I did once,” he had said. “I have rather soured on them since.” No other answer would be believable, to anyone who had observed him in the years since—

Since—

“I have no use for him myself,” his uncle had said then, and stretched out a hand to gesture toward Laurent, the heat of summer trailing his gesture. “Will you take a gift, in honor of your childhood dreams?” 

And Laurent had heard not a question but a command, and with it surely a blade to bite his breast. “You do me honor, Uncle,” he had said, a nothing for a something, and he had gone to the human, acid in the back of his throat all the while. Even half-cognizant and swaying with the transition to the lands of Summer, with the touch of the fae, Damianos had a fight to his expression, something that suggested to Laurent he would not be tractable.

Murderers rarely are. Laurent had cupped his cheek in parody of tenderness and netted magic over him like vines, warping his form from man-shaped to something smaller, sleeker if not sweeter.

...well, squirrels will still bite if given half a chance. Laurent had stooped and picked it up by the scruff, and offered his uncle the sweetest smile he yet knew how to give. "I'll teach him of our court," Laurent had said then, earnest and innocent and meaning to hand the man off to a servant and with any luck never think of him again—

"I'll look forward to seeing your work," his uncle had said, and Laurent had known forgetting would not be an option.

* * *

As predicted, the path is gone inside an hour and a half, before the sun can move more than a few degrees down the horizon in the endless summer afternoon of this field. Laurent pauses and surveys chest-high grass, mouth flat. In the distance, now, there's a dark smudge of green on the horizon like a forest, but it's a fair distance, and now they are out of path, which even humans have sense enough to know is dangerous.

The distant vines haven't advanced visibly yet, though, which he'll take as a blessing. "We need to pick up the pace," he says over his shoulder, to the shadow who has not yet faltered once.

"Do we have a deadline?" Damen wants to know. Even the sound of his voice is setting Laurent's shoulders rigid, his teeth on edge.

"These lands are alive," Laurent says, laying out the things he has known from birth in terse, clipped sentences for the benefit of someone he hates. "Blood and bone are delightful fertilizers. Lingering somewhere you aren't sure is friendly would be foolish."

"Hm." Damen comes abreast of him, now that there's no narrow path to worry about staying on, and Laurent as ever is terribly, intimately conscious of where he goes. "Shouldn't they know you?"

"You're human," Laurent tells him, which he feels should explain everything.

Damen looks at him blankly. "You're the Prince of Summer."

Apparently not enough. And they've stopped moving. Laurent sweeps his arm ahead of them, sets his feet to walking again, and the grasses murmur around them with the brush of movement, the rush of the wind sweeping through. There are words in it, if Laurent listens hard enough. The two of them are spoken of. The terms are complimentary in all the wrong ways. "It cannot have escaped your notice that I am in a... complicated position," Laurent says, just this side of brusque. He mislikes anything this close to admitting a weakness, but the prince of Akielos cannot be _this_ stupid. "Survival to the throne is a privilege, not a right."

Now that they're properly in motion again, Damen hovers just behind his shoulder, half a pace back, the position he'd grown accustomed to during those portions of his service in which he had stayed close to Laurent. "I can't imagine it," he says. It's quiet, maybe even to himself, but that doesn't stop Laurent from wanting to laugh in his face.

He bites his tongue on it. What a charmingly naive point of view. "You had better start imagining it," Laurent says dryly, when he's not about to say something that reveals he knows precisely who Damen is. "One of the consequences of not having the throne is that the lands of Summer aren't bound to listen to or obey me. Some of them will. Others prefer my uncle; some dislike the idea of having a sovereign at all."

"...Like people," Damen says slowly. Laurent swears he can hear the rusty gears in Damen's head finally starting to turn. "That's what you mean, when you say they're alive."

"Can't you hear it?" Laurent wants to know. It always takes him a little extra effort to understand what's being said or intended, certainly, but to hear nothing at all, to be so completely deaf and blind to the way plants hum and earth rumbles and even the wind has a song to sing— that's what Laurent can't imagine.

"All I can hear is you," says Damen.

In another life, it would be a romantic phrase. Here and now, Laurent is pleased only that he has made himself his enemy's world, pleased with a visceral, squeezing sort of heat under his ribs. It still strikes him like that sometimes, clawing and sudden.

"Then listen to me," Laurent says around that heat, "and keep moving."

There's quiet between them for several long minutes, broken only by footsteps and the movement of grass. The sun ticks lower just slowly enough to be agonizing; the trees in the distance begin to grow closer. Laurent tilts his head to listen to the land more intently again-- the grass has added some complaints about being constantly moved aside and stepped on to its earlier litany. He still thinks it's lying about the snakes lying in wait, but at least he can murmur an apology for the mess of their passing under his breath.

Never mind that if the grass wasn't working so hard to overgrow everything, it wouldn't be an issue and there would still be a path. There's no pleasing some lands.

The trees don't cast a shadow on the grass-field, even though the sun is slowly angling down behind them. The grasses aren't allowing it.

When they've traveled perhaps three-quarters of the total distance, and an uncomfortably long stretch of field and grass still remains stretching out before, Damen makes a mildly surprised noise, and there's a sound like a soft _thump_ , perhaps flesh against flesh. "Is this venomous?"

_Venomous_ is not a word Laurent wants to hear. He turns around to see that Damen's caught a snake, has it in a firm grip just behind the head and is giving it a quizzical look. It’s a long one, thick with muscle; Damen’s hand doesn’t close around it. “Would you care to find out?” Laurent inquires, eying its scales. They’re a bright green, somewhere between the vibrant color of a fir’s new growth and the hissing sharpness of acid or poison. Personally, he’ll pass.

Damen transfers his gaze to it with a tightness of expression that implies he’s having much the same train of thought Laurent is. “If I kill it, will that be— bad?”

“That depends on your definition,” Laurent says, watching the snake hiss and writhe. Its body coils around Damen’s forearm, squeezing fruitlessly; it can’t get its head bent around to sink fangs into Damen’s arm, though it’s certainly trying. “We already have its attention, and the field’s. And I’d say it’s already more than clear we are not welcome here.”

“But,” Damen prompts, which is surprising; Laurent had half-expected him to take it as carte blanche and have done.

“But small favors sometimes return,” Laurent says. He reviews the angle and height where the snake had been immediately when he first turned to see it, and wonders. If Damen had snatched it out of the air, then it would have been aimed straight at Laurent; if it had been on the ground before he snatched it up, it might have been for either of them. “And there is such thing as manners befitting a guest.”

He already owes the debt of his life once over, and dislikes the thought of owing it twice. No; the sensible predator would keep its belly to the earth. Laurent turns his head deliberately away from Damen, instead cocks his head listening. Wind in the grass, and the strained creaking noises of rapid, rapid growth. A voice between them all, something made of grass-seed and snake-scales. There is more where that came from, it tells Laurent. Take a hint.

In principle, Laurent is making a face at it, but in practice he keeps a smooth and distant expression, a mask untouched by concern. “If you’re done playing with that, we should be moving on.”

“ _Playing_ with—" Damen cuts himself off before much more can make it out of his mouth, but it’s too late to conceal that he’s nettled. Laurent doesn’t look back, but listens over his shoulder, and he doesn’t get the sound he expects: there’s the noise of movement, skin and rustling cloth, and of something lean and writhing parting the air, sailing a long way. The grasses whisper something different. 

Laurent had not expected Damen to be a man who would show mercy to an enemy. His own life saved— a tactical advantage. This, to a construct that would as soon kill them as look at them? There’s nothing to gain, and their situation is hardly likely to improve one way or another. 

He knows why mercy was not for Auguste; but all the same, his heart demands the answer, wailing with the petulant want of the toddler. Fortunately, Laurent has long since given up listening purely to his heart. “Let’s _go_ ,” he says pointedly, and moves without waiting.

* * *

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a human in the fae courts exists only at the pleasure of the lords and ladies, and also that an equivalent volume of spiders is, in some cases, considered still to be an _existence_. Laurent, eyeballing a slumped human prince still shivering off the aftereffects of a forced change, rather wishes he could just make Damianos cease to exist at all. No uncle’s trap, no brother’s murderer, no problem half the court is going to have their eyes on waiting for Laurent to slip up one way or another.

His life has never been that convenient. Damianos is here to stay. Laurent’s not naïve; he’s well aware disappearing his uncle’s gift will have some repercussion or other. He can’t afford that.

But it does mean he actually has to find something to do with the human. In an ideal world, something that will keep him where Laurent doesn’t have to _see_ him every day. He knows himself: too many reminders, too much ruminating in this trouble, and he’s liable to find some excuse to take it further out of Damianos’s hide in blood and pain. 

Oh, but the things he could take from Damianos—!

And that is precisely why he can’t. Laurent bites his tongue over it, resolving. As soon as he can do it without being caught, or as soon as his uncle is, dare he think it, out of the picture. A clean death, nothing more, and nothing less. It’s more than the human deserves.

Damianos has managed to get to his knees while Laurent thinks. He’s not armed, but he’s not restrained either; if Laurent wasn’t who and what he is, he might have cause to be concerned for his life. From this angle the man’s thighs look as big around as tree trunks — it’s unrealistic the amount of space he takes up with muscle, like some sculptor has opted to exaggerate all his traits to make more striking art and never mind what’s _realistic_. 

“Damen, isn’t it?” Laurent says, as much to grab his attention as it is to accustom himself to the nickname. “Have you any arts?”

In an older time, human artists were welcomed among the fae courts. Singers and poets, painters and sculptors: they came, and they were touched, and they reached heights they would spend their lives trying to recapture once they returned home. If they returned home.

Damianos’s broad shoulders shift, something like a shrug in the movement of a mountain. “I’m a soldier,” he says simply. 

A king’s son had better be able to do more than _fight_ , unless that’s all humans these days are good for, blood and iron. Laurent’s mouth flattens with the annoyance of chafing against the boundaries of who is and isn’t supposed to know things. “That’s a pity,” he says instead. “I have no need for soldier or manservant.”

There’s a moment as Damianos clearly tries to marshal himself. “What _do_ you need?” he asks. His voice is low and a little rough, perhaps with lingering pain or confusion; his eyes are fixed somewhere on the floor to Laurent’s left. 

He _needs_ his brother back. “Nothing,” Laurent says shortly, and is rewarded for it when Damianos’s gaze jerks up, meeting his for the first time. There is fear there, and Laurent is satisfied for it; but there is something else, kindled in the human, some determination which is rather less than comforting. “I don’t need anything from you. If you can’t offer me the barest of entertainment—“ There’s another option, of course, long traditional, but Laurent doesn’t want to touch him even in passing, much less take him to bed. “—then there’s no use for me to keep you close.”

Laurent doesn’t give him a chance to say something more; he turns, and goes out of that room, intending to find the seneschal and... well. Not hand Damianos over. But communicate that the human should join the more standard staff, and be taught how to serve the lords and ladies of Summer, and make some use of himself _that_ way. He will be seen to serve, and Laurent will interact minimally with him, and not think about the burn of indignity and grief lingering low in his gut. He has a lot of practice at not thinking about it.

* * *

The warning shot of the snake has served to put Laurent back on his guard, as on-edge as he should have been in truth from the beginning, and Damen seems to finally be taking the threats seriously. The overgrowing vines make it in toward them, reaching and hopeful, as the sun sets. Laurent spits poisonous words that leave them cooked and sizzling and curling away, and Damen and his terrible blade handle the rest. It’s a trial, but not much of one, and before they cross over into the finally-found forest Laurent makes a shallow cut along the back of his arm, offers the blood to the field with all due respect. 

Some few drops of it are swallowed up by the earth and the grass. “Thank you for letting us pass,” Laurent says sweetly to it, with a step back to put him safe among the trees.

Safe is a relative thing, of course; but they’re not about to find out what _else_ lives in those grasses, so Laurent will call it at least half of a win. The grass did say there were larger serpents afield.

“I’m not sure it _let_ us do anything,” Damen says tersely. He’s at a further remove, watching Laurent, and his eyes drop to the wound when Laurent turns to him. “What was that about?”

“As I said. Manners,” Laurent says, and passes his other hand over the cut. It closes just enough to leave a red line, enough that it won’t be dripping on everything as they go, but he doesn’t want to expend more energy than that. “The sun’s nearly down. Have you enough fortitude to keep going?” 

Damen considers it gravely, eventually offers a noncommittal flattening of his hand in return. “If it were necessary, yes. If it isn’t, I would say to take the opportunity to rest where we can, not knowing where the way ahead will allow for it. Is this place safe?”

Laurent regards him with a withering look until Damen begins to appear as if he has understood the inherent foolishness of the question, and then puts the expression away for later. “I think I know these trees,” he says instead, gesturing up and around. They are cedar and pine, fir and spruce, the trees that stay green all the year round. Faithful trees, ones Laurent recalls from his childhood. Not, necessarily, safe: but familiar in temperament if nothing else, and not likely to do something _completely_ unprovoked. 

“That’s not as reassuring as you think it is,” Damen tells him, and Laurent genuinely can’t help the tight curve of a smile that tilts up one corner of his mouth. “I’ll watch half the night.”

It’s nice that he’s not quite so naive to speak the corollary, _if you trust me with it_. Of course Laurent doesn’t, not independently. But: without him, Damen will die here, alone and lost in fae lands; and without Damen, without some backup, Laurent is honestly likely to do the same. To say nothing of the impossible quest he now has, draped over his shoulders like some terrible iron yoke. 

He trusts Damen’s sense of self-preservation, which actually has been proven to exist now and then. As much as Laurent trusts anything.

“Let’s find a place to settle, first,” Laurent says, and, “ _Don’t_ even think about cutting anything.”

Damen touches the sword at his side, and puts his hand away from it. “...I suppose the weather’s warm enough we don’t need a fire,” he says carefully. 

Hah. Of course it is. This is Summer. Laurent makes a heroic effort of will not to roll his eyes at the sheer inanity, and moves light-footed further into the forest, steps soft against the carpet of fallen needles. He murmurs under his breath as he goes, speaking to the forest, to whomever might be waiting in it: _do you remember me? I think I knew you, when I was a child_. He wants to think the branches lean in, that there is something warmer and more welcoming in the air. It would be nice if that was the case.

Laurent tries not to count on the kindness of others, these days.

They find a place in the lee of an old cedar, some distance further into the forest. Far enough there’s no path in or out visible, and Laurent knows either the woods must let them out, by kindness or blood or fire, or their bones will feed the trees for years to come. 

“I’ll take the first watch,” Laurent says stiffly, reasoning that it will take his own suspicions at least that much time to calm down enough to sleep. 

“All right,” says Damen, alarmingly peaceable, and tucks himself up in his cloak, and appears to drop right off to sleep. It leaves Laurent staring at him nearly flabbergasted — how is that even possible? The man is in the middle of faerie woods, knows he may just as well be eaten as make it out alive. And certainly, a life-debt binds Laurent from acting too far against him; but it is one thing to know a fact, and another to _believe_ it, to trust in it so whole-heartedly that one naps so easily in the midst of enemy territory. Territory which has been pointedly proven to have it out for him.

Laurent concludes that Damianos, crown prince of Akielos, is simply an idiot. It’s the only explanation for all of _this_ ; and it would go a long way to explaining how he wound up here in the first place. 

Time passes. Laurent perches on one massive root. He has boots, soft leather that cushions without deadening his sense of the earth, but he pulls them off now, presses the soles of his feet to the rough bark. It’s a little piece of his own foolishness, but he remembers—

—days with his brother in the lands of Summer, where the sun angled golden through the trees and everything was verdancy and light; and the perfect place for so many things, reading or watching the wild things pass or simply listening to the stories Auguste told, was up among the branches, tucked secure in a curl of crackling bark and friendly branch—

—how long those days were, and how perfect, and how sharp the bite of grief when they were gone. Laurent tilts his head back to look up, and up, and up, where the branches rustle and shift. Here there is a growing darkness, the warm depth of a summer night, and the moon has not risen bright as it might yet do. He should not indulge himself in memories, not when his position and his life are both so very tenuous. 

And yet: memories are all he has, of that time.

Consciously Laurent drags his gaze around the environs, making a point to himself, though if he has to rely purely on his sense of sight to tell him danger’s approaching, he’s a poor prince of Summer indeed. But all is still, and there are no wild things. Not here, not yet. His eyes skip over Damen, a bundled lump of color against the deep brown and grey of bark and earth and stone, move past to scan the trees beyond him, and then with some resignation come back to look over Damen again. 

That which Damen had come to the court of Summer with had mostly been disposed off, save the sword with iron along its back, which had been kept safe and secret, somewhere his uncle knew, and somewhere Laurent spent the better part of a few months locating and quietly retrieving in a fit of paranoia. What Damen wears now is of fae make, leather and linen and never a touch of iron but bronze or copper instead, and a cloak of wool traded from Winter. No doubt it would suit his sensibilities better were it crimson, but instead a deep blue prevails, close cousin to the summer-sky blue Laurent favors. Damen’s dark hair is longer than it was, uncut over the past year, such that it curls more gently at his ears, at the nape of his neck—

Laurent recognizes that he is having a peculiar train of thought, and rearranges his focus a little lower, where between hair and tunic there is a space of bare skin, and the hint of ropy, almost silvery scars clawing lower under the cloth. It’s a better reminder for him, of the utter nonsense that would be presuming any kind of true trust between him and Damianos. 

He doesn’t think Damen remembers who’s responsible. He can’t put aside the possibility that he does.

* * *

The arrangement of simple servitude to keep Damianos out of his sight doesn’t last, of course. On some level Laurent had probably known he was only buying himself time. All the same, he might have hoped it could last longer. 

“Laurent,” his uncle says, all honeyed words on poison bread. “Is this all my gifts mean to you?” 

‘This’ is Damianos, kneeling, smudged from kitchen work and dressed down. Somehow, the plain cut and color of the clothes does absolutely nothing to reduce the impression of his size and musculature. It’s almost distracting, which is annoying at a time when Laurent definitely needs to focus. He adds it to the list of things to lay at Damianos’s feet and puts the feeling away for now.

“In truth, uncle, I was contemplating the best thing to do with him,” Laurent murmurs. It’s true _enough_ , anyway, with all the thinking he’d had to do on that note. He’s not one of those fae who can’t bend the truth, but he generally finds that _most_ of the truth is a good policy. The fewer outright lies he tells, the less there is to catch him out on later, and the more ways he can declare innocently that he must simply have been misunderstood. “I would not like to waste your gift, nor break him by accident. You know how hard we can be on humans, after all...”

His uncle does not subside there, more’s the pity. “You have had well on a month to think about it,” he says coaxingly. “Come now. Surely there’s no reason to keep him at arm’s length?”

_He murdered my brother_. Laurent tilts his head to the side, smiles winningly. He can sense that the point they’re at, if he doesn’t choose something, the choice will be made for him. “Perhaps,” Laurent says, “I shall teach him to dance.” 

It’s not bad, as fronts go. Some dances are not too far removed from sword-forms, and it keeps Damianos from being somewhere like Laurent’s wardrobe or his bed; and yet, a soldier will certainly need some instruction to learn to dance as entertainment for the court, for the prince. Laurent bites the tip of his tongue to focus on that bright burst of pain, instead of any giveaway expression.

“What a lovely idea,” says his uncle, and Laurent does not relax.

The idea functions more or less as intended. The trouble is, of course, that with Damianos inside of arm’s reach, instead of out of sight and mind in the kitchens, Laurent cannot clear the man from his head. Worse still is the banked rebellion in him: in the end he always backs down, seemingly conscious of where he is and the fact he is pretending to be no prince at all, but nevertheless there is a fire inside him, a sort of challenge Laurent can’t help but want to meet. Worst of all: there are some moments, sniping over the placement of an arm or an obscure rule of the court of Summer, that Laurent thinks the challenge would be _fun_. 

At least with a little tutelage, Damianos _can_ dance. It’s a special sort of torture, all things considered; but like anything else, over time it approaches tolerable. A person can get used to anything, after all, and Laurent is already used to being on his guard.

But once, once, there is a moment where Laurent touches him, bare skin to bare skin, correcting a movement, and something electric and dangerous thrills out of the contact, up his arm to tug at deeper things.

Just once. Only once. Laurent is very careful never to touch him again, until everything goes wrong.

Solstice in the Summer Court is either a great festival or a mourning wake, depending on the season. In retrospect Laurent ought to have expected something at the Summer solstice, as the longest day of the year stretches out and the endless heat of Summer turns into dominion. Half the court is drunk on mead and the other half on sheer sensation, and in merriment the day and night and much of the _next_ day are spent. Laurent stays sober but for what he can't avoid, and always he is watchful for needles and blades, curses and hexes and hungrier things.

He hadn't thought to find Damianos in his rooms, drunk with something hotter than mead, made up in gold leaf and smoke and silk like a whisper, the darkness of his eyes turned to something heady and molten. It had pulled Laurent up short without even the need for touch. "Get out," Laurent had said, without other preamble, and made sure he was well clear of the path between bed and door. He doesn't have to know the whole of a plan to know a viper when he sees it.

For some few moments he thought he had seen something sharper behind Damianos's eyes, some cognizance of the way this series of events is doubtless supposed to play out. It can only be wishing and foolish dreaming that has Laurent thinking— even a terrible foe who somehow understood him would yet be better than having nothing, nothing and no one at all to stand at his back.

Instead of making it cleanly out the door, Damianos stumbles into Laurent, one hand catching his hip, and Laurent's wishful thinking instantly burns to ash underneath instinctive, furious reaction.

Three seconds after Laurent has bent his power on Damianos, wrenched him from a human form to something legless and crawling, he knows he's using it as an excuse— knows what the honorable thing to do would be— knows what the _smart_ thing to do would be, when someone had to have put Damianos here in the first place and hoped for rape, murder, or scandal, and this is just playing into those hands—

In the minutes as Laurent takes years of pent-up hate out on Damianos's skin, he doesn't _care_ what's right.

He drags Damianos from one shape into another so fast there isn't time for Damianos's instincts to catch up, before the pain of any one change can ebb. Snake into rabbit into fish into cat into salamander, faster and faster and faster, each one gasping for air and trying desperately to adjust as flesh twists and melts and changes and _changes—_

" _Laurent—_ " comes thundered from the hall, a voice striking something deeper than precisely rational thought in Laurent. If he was thinking clearly he might note that for his uncle to be so quick on the response, he must have been waiting for something to happen, planning to intercede or watch as the situation demanded.

He isn't thinking clearly, and so he simply freezes, summer-hot magic coiling idle around his hands, and his brother's murderer trembling on the floor at his feet.

It isn't enough. _It isn't enough_.

* * *

Laurent has long since mastered how far he can let his mind wander and still keep sufficient attention on his surroundings. So he perches among the high gnarls of the tree's roots and skims his gaze across the dips and shadows and movements of the forest, this way and that, occasionally scanning the canopy just in case of birds or especially inventive carnivores, and all the while his thoughts are not _completely_ present.

They have a distance to go yet. Three is the traditional number for challenges, and Laurent estimates they've had one, if he's fortunate. He's not convinced the snakes in the field were true obstacle, unless the sheer fact of Damen's presence was something to render trivial the games the land plays with its children. It seems unlikely at best. Still, it _is_ true that the geography of these lands has always been malleable, shifting with intent and desire and mood and the wicked whims of the wind.

The wind isn't saying much now, only a low familiar hum. Laurent wants to find it friendly, a relic from his childhood, and he simply can't. There are too many places where sharp things can hide.

So he thinks of the path forward, and of the truths of Summer and the fae that he takes for granted and which Damen won't have begun to understand even in his time under the hills, and the moon climbs high, casting warped, silver-strange shadows that move with the breeze and the branches.

Most of all, Laurent doesn't look at Damen. He needs _some_ time of not being reminded the man exists.

He marks the time by the moon, more or less, and perhaps lets it go a little longer than he should have; but then again, Laurent would rather have the more muscular of them well rested. To say nothing of the impending difficulty of finding his own rest with only Damen to keep the watch...

Perhaps he can still balance up in the branches well enough to sleep without other concern. Laurent presses his mouth flat to restrain the telltale sigh that wants to escape him, and descends from the root to go and wake Damen quietly. Stones and fir-needles prickle at his feet, but it's hardly a long span he has to cover _._

Except—

Damen isn't where Laurent left him.

Laurent stares at the empty nook in the tree's roots, for several precious moments absolutely dumbstruck that the man has so _few_ survival instincts as to wander off in the middle of the fae lands. Analytical thinking takes horrible yawning seconds to kick in, but when Laurent _can_ think clearly around how doomed they both are— he sees it. The shape of the tree has changed. A curve here where there wasn't before, an interesting set of whorls like the bark is debating which direction to go after splitting and rejoining. And here, the roots are certainly higher than they were, almost bulging.

Delicately intent, Laurent bites his tongue until it bleeds. He will not do anything rash or unwise. He will not. It's only that he needs Damen, right now, and he has _nothing to trade_. He cannot bargain with anything but himself, and even a significant amount of the blood of a prince of Summer is worth less than a full human life.

Which means he needs to start negotiating from a position of absolute power, and so he cannot be bluffing.

He needs Damen to have any hope of turning his uncle's plans in on him. If Laurent wants to reclaim the throne of Summer -- even if he wants to _live_ , content or at the very least not exiled to die a miserable death in human lands — then there's really only one choice here.

Laurent sets his palm flat against the bark, over the largest swell of new and twisting growth. It's warm under his hand, like the sun has shone here for hours, like a human heart beats red and hot beneath. Damen's shoulder, perhaps, or the broad curve of his back? Laurent digs his fingers in just slightly, intimately aware of each scrape of bark against his fingertips, prickling and threatening to splinter. "Let me have your attention," he says to the tree.

It is not a request. Branches shudder just faintly, rustling enough to let Laurent know: he is heard, and the forest before him is listening.

"Give him back to me," Laurent says, "or I will carve you apart with iron and set the torch to whatever remains myself."

The wind in the branches seems to moan, and there's a louder shifting of the branches against one another, shiver-sliding and giving rise to layers and layers of sound. Laurent bites the inside of his cheek instead, now, and wills himself to show nothing of the reticence he feels. "I recognize you desire tribute for our passage," he says, keying off the hungrier undertones of the whispering and rustling. "I will share of my blood, but I have little else with me. I can promise you this: that when I am king, I will return with fowl and cattle, blood and bone to give to your roots."

He pauses for effect. The tree before him, the forest at large, seem to understand that he is not yet done. Laurent goes on. "And if you do not release him to me, I promise blade and flame, iron and salt. I am happy to prove my sincerity, in either case."

The bark under his hand quivers, a ripple like the surface of the water, struck. Laurent thinks of childhood, of sunlight through tree branches, of the wrenching feeling not unlike carving his own heart out with the action of reaching for his knife.

It's highly unlikely that this is any of the trees he remembers from boyhood and those lazy days with Auguste. The symbolism, however, cannot be denied; and life being what it is for the fae, symbolism will always carry more weight than it will for a human studying a literary text.

There is no answer from the tree. No words or meaning Laurent can coax out of the sounds of wind and growth and branches, and no motion to let Damen go. Laurent unsheathes the knife at his belt, beaten copper and greened with verdigris and vines around the hilt. "You leave me no choice," Laurent says clearly, and touches the fine edge of the blade to the root, beside his hand. Here he hesitates— just a moment— 

Nothing happens, and hesitation is weakness. Laurent cuts.

Thick sap wells up in heavy, rounded drops. The moonlight catches the swell of them and glints darkly; like this, it's nearly impossible to tell from blood. Laurent drags the blade down along the broad curve he thinks must be Damen, surely _has_ to be the damnably human prince of Akielos. He doesn't know how deeply to cut, how much force to give. It's entirely possible some of the sap beading up where he's cut actually is blood, but Laurent can't tell for sure, and he'd rather cut too deep and patch Damen up after than have to saw back and forth again and again.

With any luck, he'll only need to do enough work here to prove a point, and the tree will open up the rest of the way. If not, Laurent has the semblance of a plan. Find Damen, trace his form to _his_ blade, then draw that free and start hacking. If he can hold the blade. The iron blade is in a protective sheath of leather right now, at least, or Laurent suspects the roots wouldn't have been able to close over it— or that he would see it even like this, marked out where bark would bubble or melt. Instead there's no visible sign of it, and so Laurent is cutting alarmingly blindly and hoping he doesn’t mortally wound Damen in the effort to free him.

And the tree isn't being particularly obliging or convenient, either. Laurent grits his teeth and keeps going, and in the end he finds Damen by the trickle of hot blood that wells up— only now can he tell the difference between the sap and the blood, can tell it by the way it pools in the spaces between his fingers with a flowing, liquid quality the sap outright lacks. Damn and blast and _wither the roots_.

Laurent doesn't curse out loud. That would be admitting this is getting to him. Instead he clamps the knife by its hilt between his teeth and pulls at the gap he's made, prying at layers of bark to pull them apart. Some few flakes crack away easily; the rest is a slow, prying process of widening the cut enough to get a hand into it. There's sap and more sap, but only that — the tree hasn't had long enough to grow any more over Damen than that. Laurent finds something that feels like skin under it all, slicked with blood, and fumbles blind until he figures out what he has. An arm. This is an arm. Laurent curls his fingers around that arm and rocks his own from side to side, widening the gap by bare increments.

It's thankless, painful work, but eventually Laurent manages to pull most of Damen's arm free, sticky and slick but out in the open air, and he can see the shiver as muscles tense. He can only assume the pain has woken Damen, and hopes he’s realized _something_ , though whatever his human mind has put together is probably tolerably far from the truth of this all—

He doesn't have time even for mental insults. Laurent takes the knife from his teeth and cuts at the edges of the wound in the tree now, widening it so either he can find Damen's blade, or Damen himself can work free. It's the right arm Laurent's managed to find, and he knows the blade is positioned for a right-hand draw, so it shouldn't be too hard to find — simply trace down to the lower back, and he'll be able to pull it free. He finds the broad shoulder — manages to pull a wide sheaf of bark away to bare much more of the long stretch of Damen's back — reaches for the damp leather sheath.

The hilt is wrapped with leather, too, cushioning the mortal weight; but the solid metal underneath has so much iron in it that the force of the cold nearly burns Laurent anyway. He tries anyway, shifts his knife to his off-hand and takes hold of the sword as if to draw, but his fingers refuse to close, such is the weight of the iron. Laurent hisses, telling himself this is vexation more than pain, and tries again. He needs this to work, needs to be able to turn the iron on the tree, and if he cannot—

Laurent catches himself in the beginning of something frantic and stops himself with an effort of will. Damen is stirring, even if it’s slow and sleepy. The wound and Laurent’s blindly groping hands have done their job to wake him. Laurent keeps to his own strengths instead, weaves a spell for waking and ties the glowing threads of it around Damen’s wrist; and as Damen begins to finally help pry himself free, almost painfully slowly, Laurent reaches for his hand and steers it toward the hilt of the sword.

The moment where Damen takes firm hold of the hilt and, even half engulfed still, draws— Laurent feels alight, with relief and something more vibrantly excited, and can't name the electricity of it as anything at all.

* * *

He's felt that same nameless thing once before with Damen, back under the hills: when Winter's frost along with his knaves had crept away from diplomacy into the shadows, and come out again with glistening-ice spears in Laurent's chambers. It's no wonder, at this rate, that Laurent often chooses to sleep in the library, perched high atop a bookshelf with summer-sun wards spun along the edges thinner than spiderwebs.

That day he had not been. That day he had been tending to the human, overseeing the re-settling of his instincts and shape. Post-change repair can be easy, for the fae— not, so much, for humans. His uncle had decreed that Laurent should fix what he had broken, and also that if something _more_ happened to the human, he would assume on principle it was Laurent's fault.

He would not have been wrong. More than once Laurent considers that he could just — slip — and take the consequences, and the human would still be just as dead after, except.

Except that Laurent still has goals which mean he really can't take any more trouble than is strictly necessary, including putting himself over-much in harm's way, and while he is not in the heat of a moment he cannot seem to forget that.

Scars have lingered, long and silvery, warped across the olive skin of the human's back. He's not always entirely conscious, and when he is Laurent isn't convinced he recognizes where he is, who he's with. That's fine. That's probably easiest, honestly. Laurent sits by the cot set up for his supervision, tries not to sneer about the whole farce of a thing, and instead drops lazy nets of healing magic over Damianos every so often. Human, he thinks, or human-shaped, and no more to change, only to _be_.

He tries not to flavor the magic with anything like feelings. Sometimes entire workings need to be discarded.

So his hands are full of that, all blue-gold stretched out and delicate, and there's a sound like a shiver, like the first breath of frost across sprouts that aren't ready for it. Laurent startles forward on reflex, since the sound came from slightly behind, and he spins with his hands full of healing, not quite blooming. Useless for a fight, unless he can redirect it to the growth of wood, the animation of rope, but the intruders — he has _wards_ for this sort of thing, who sabotaged them! — are all over silver and crystal, and there is nothing there in metal and ice for Laurent to find immediate purchase on.

The damned cot hits the backs of his knees.

He casts his muddled magics forward anyway, reasoning the light-show might be sufficient distraction, and finds the copper-vined knife at his belt, sets himself for a fight that's going to be short and brutal one way or another. Already Laurent is resigned to the fact he won't come out of this unwounded, that some part of him is going to be bleeding or frost-singed before the day is out and then he'll have an injury _and_ a human to contend with in his efforts to survive to formal majority and throne. Death by inches, if the larger one fails.

Laurent puts that future issue to the side, since he needs to live to it first — ducks under a blow, winces as he finds a floor made slippery with ice, compromising his footing— 

When did the human get to his feet?

It throws Laurent more than he wants to admit, seeing the human upright. He's clearly not at full strength — he wavers, and Laurent has to cover the openings he leaves more than once with quick flashes of his own blade. And still Laurent's half-expecting the human to turn on him—

He doesn't. Dazed, still unmistakeably recovering from things Laurent did to him, Damianos protects Laurent.

Laurent calculates possibilities — this is something he didn't think of earlier and should have — if Damianos is any further injured, Laurent will have a different sort of problem with his uncle. It's something that can't be discounted.

But:

Even like this, Damianos is brutally efficient in a fight, and it buys Laurent time to weave magic made of all the hottest days of summer, the sun overhead and the inescapable heat, the too-close brightness that makes the vibrant flowers grow huge and strong. And then he casts it free, intentional and fully made, and there are no more shadows in Laurent's chambers: nothing for hiding, nothing for relief, only the bright, and the heat, and the steam of the ice evaporating off the floor.

And Damianos, barely clad and slick with sweat born of magic and exertion both.

He's not bleeding. Laurent is intimately aware of this because there's nowhere to put his eyes that doesn't involve acres of bare skin. There are scars — the ones Laurent gave him, and the ones he had before — but there are no fresh injuries. There's one arrow dodged.

Damianos sways on his feet. Laurent considers that the human has, probably, saved his life. This encounter alone, or with someone who was deadweight, or refused to act?

Well. Alone, Laurent wouldn't have been in this situation in the first place.

But Damianos stumbles, and dips, and Laurent reaches out to steady him before he can do himself more harm. Somehow in the process Laurent forgets about breathing.

It's an inexcusable lapse, that moment where he's simply Laurent, not carrying the weight of Auguste's corpse along behind him. Laurent feels—

He _feels_ , and it's something that makes him shiver for heat, like lightning stitching across a storm-sky, and he can't for the life of him name what it is, only that it's somewhere between Damianos's lidded gaze on him and the simple fact of contact—

Laurent bites his tongue, hard, and steers Damianos back to the cot. Whatever that is, it doesn't matter.

It can't matter.

* * *

Once Damen has hold of the sword, that's honestly all Laurent needs to do save stand back. He watches those heavy muscles work, powerful and intent, as Damen draws and hews. At first it's inelegant, awkward owing to angle and drowsiness and breath that could not reach lungs, but bark peels back all the same, and wood blisters, sears winter-cold, iron-cold with blackened edges where the blade passes. Damen frees himself, piece by piece. He stumbles out of the roots, gasping for breath, something wild about his eyes. Sap slicks his dark hair flat to his head, and blood coats one arm, and as he turns he looks like some barbarian monster out of the whispered horror stories of the court: something huge and raw made of clay or stone or even pure iron, and knowing only the destruction before him.

And yet:

He pauses.

He pauses, and Laurent can't think what in the world he's waiting for. Surely next comes the ruinous fall of the blade, iron through the wood of Summer like the easy slide of melting ice.

It doesn't come. Damen looks back, eyes on Laurent, and it is hard to see in the moon and the sap and the dark ways of the forest, but perhaps there is a question there.

Mercy, or not? Favors, given, are sometimes returned; but when Laurent has so little besides his word to trade on, it wouldn't be precisely in his best interests to start devaluing that now, or in any other way intimating that he won't follow through on threats. And childhood nostalgia is a poor sextant to use, for someone in the sort of position Laurent finds himself in.

Damen is still looking at him, and the wind rustles in the branches, and goodwill is hard to come by. "Leave it," Laurent says, nearly surprising himself with it, and pointedly he turns his head away. Not a threat any longer, either Damen or the tree, or he'd still be looking at them-- at least, that's what the motion's intended to get across. It might work, even when Laurent barely believes it himself.

"...you're sure?" Damen asks.

Laurent doesn't look back. "It's not worth the time it would take to hack this entire forest down," he says dismissively. He feels as brittle around the edges as he thinks he probably sounds. "And just one tree wouldn't hardly make a dent. We should, however, _keep moving_."

There is silence for a few precious moments; then there are footsteps as Damen follows after him, and it looses a knot of tension in Laurent's shoulders he hadn't _wanted_ made looser, to know that the human follows with him still. "...Don't sheathe the sword," Laurent adds in a very quiet undertone, lest anything in the underbrush — or the bushes themselves — get any ideas.

"I hadn't planned to," Damen says, with an equal sort of tension in his own quiet voice.

Progressing in the moonlight doesn't go perhaps as smoothly as a daytime travel would. Laurent's always going to have more of his strength about him in the day, but given these options— there aren't really any options. He doesn't try to speak to the forest, and he doesn't think about all that might be behind, directing his intent only at what lies before.

Eventually the forest thins slowly. The moon is still reasonably high overhead, and dawn hasn't touched those pieces of the horizon now visible. Laurent hasn't slept in — he doesn't know how long — and Damen, while he may have gotten some sleep, doesn't look much better than Laurent feels. He's still coated in sap, sticking his clothes to his body, and where bare skin is visible it still looks sticky.

Not that Laurent's looking. He darts little intermittent glances backward just to make up for his earlier lapse, just to make sure Damen's still there and hasn't been snatched off by something else equally sneaking and hungry. It's fine.

"Will it be just as pointless if I ask how much further?" Damen wants to know. The ruinous blade is still bare in his hand. Now that the branches have cleared the sky even a little, Laurent can catch moonlight glinting dully off it on one of his furtive glances back. This, too, is still sticky with sap. He assumes it'll need cleaned and cared for just like any other blade, iron or no iron.

"There's not a good answer to that question," Laurent allows. "I _told_ you. Distance doesn't mean much here. It might be miles, or it might be inches, but without the _blessing of the throne—_ " He tries not to spit this. It's been a long day and night. "—we are at the mercy of the land and the season. Three is the traditional number, but there are variations in any story."

"Three _what_?"

He doesn't necessarily blame Damen's impatience, but nevertheless the ignorance chafes at him. "Just three," Laurent says. He glances back yet again, this time to check precisely how distant the forest is from them. The dense darkness of wood now looks like something further; the land they are in is only pockmarked by trees, shaded occasionally. He thinks he hears running water. "Three anything. Challenges. Obstacles. _Choices_ , if nothing else."

Damen seems to be considering this, at least. Laurent surveys the landscape that lies before them, the horizon still hazy as if it's deciding what to be. Running water, yes. A certain heaviness about what land he _can_ see. The color is hard to tell, with all the light still mostly scant and silver. He's not sure it's real yet — or, that is, the physical underpinnings surely exist, but if there is a spirit in them yet Laurent can't see it, and can't hear it speaking to him.

With nothing else to do, he turns them to the sound of rushing water, and footsteps behind him tell him Damen still follows, improbable in his existence but mercifully practical about his loyalty.

Within a handful of minutes the river comes clear, and it couldn't look more of a boundary if it tried. Laurent paces along its bank for a little time further, still with his shadowing human behind him, intimately aware in every minute of Damen’s presence. The best he gets is slightly calmer waters, and no idea how deep the river goes nor how far. The bank does not give, the river does not narrow. Laurent has the distinct impression he’s being challenged. 

He stops finally on a little curve of land, along where the river has bent, and surveys their options. They’re precious few. 

“Is it safe to bathe?” Damen wonders. He’s a little more venturesome than Laurent’s wariness right now, approaching some few steps further and crouching to look over the river before them. “Would that be giving offense?” 

“Maybe if you don’t appreciate it enough,” Laurent says, a little darkly. 

Damen reaches out, touches a hand gingerly to the river’s surface. It behaves just as water ought, clear spray parting where Damen interferes with it, and does precious little else. Like this, Laurent can see the dark blood mingled with sap along his forearm. It’s dark enough that it might be dried, but the stickiness of the same sap that had helped stanch the bleeding also makes it still look wet. Laurent can’t tell from here, and shouldn’t take chances. “Come here,” he says abruptly. He’s half expecting a refusal out of hand, or some query as to why, but Damen just straightens up and comes back toward him. Perhaps the instructions about how to approach the faerie lands best — that is, listening to Laurent — have finally started to sink in. 

That’d be nice if it were true, but Laurent isn’t expecting miracles. He holds his hands out, beckoning for Damen’s. The great wall of oblivious muscle gives him the wrong one at first, and Laurent arches a deeply skeptical eyebrow at this, just short of withering. “Oh,” Damen says blankly, and gives Laurent the injured one.

Obviously blood loss has made him thick. Laurent should have taken care of this earlier. He takes the offered hand, turns it this way and that to see the details of the injury as well as he can in the poor light. “This is a mess,” Laurent informs him, completely disregarding the fact that he was the one to make it in the first place. “I’m going to heal this, and then you’re for the river to get clean.”

“Don’t spend more energy than you need to,” Damen says. Laurent makes the mistake of looking up at his face, finds the human’s eyes darker than usual and all full of some sort of emotion, something terribly hard to make out in the dim. There’s no way it’s anything _safe,_ of course. But all the same, Laurent wants to know what it is.

He cannot ask. He looks down instead, and starts weaving a magic together. It comes more slowly than it would on a good day, a day in which he had actually gotten some sleep, but it comes to his fingers nevertheless: summer-sun and easy warmth, and the way a tree knits itself together after a wound. In his hands something that is not quite a net glows, soft and warm-golden, and Laurent thinks if he looked up he would see Damen’s face in better detail, perhaps understand more clearly.

Laurent does not look up. He lays the magic over Damen’s arm, and it sinks in slow but firm. For several long moments there is a glow like a distant sunrise under Damen’s skin. Laurent finds he is inescapably aware of how much skin there is, and the shape of the muscles under, and the strength in this man. 

Much like whatever Damen is doing with his face, Laurent doesn’t know what to do with this awareness, and so he does nothing at all. He watches flesh knit together, pushing out what impurities had made it into the wound and making the sap glisten afresh, and when he is satisfied he steps back and does not let his touch linger. 

He is more tired than he would like. “River,” Laurent says pointedly.

Thoughtfully Damen turns his head to sniff at himself. It’s ridiculous and foolish. Laurent has to work to flatten his mouth out anyway. “Are you sure it’s not going to turn into acid?” 

“As sure as I can be.” Which is to say, not very much at all. Laurent bites his tongue on the snappishness and tries to unwind it into something more useful, something that will make sense to a human. “It’s not its nature,” he says finally, himself moving to the edge. “A river holds a great deal of life. To turn to something not water would end all of that. Nature may kill indiscriminately, but massacre is a very... _human_ thing.” 

“And the tree?” 

“Bones and meat and blood have always made good fertilizer,” Laurent says, and this time there is an edge to it that he doesn’t try to restrain. “You aren’t special just because you’re still walking. I didn’t expect it, but...”

He didn’t expect it. That’s enough to tell the human. Laurent shakes his head. “I won’t make such a mistake again,” he says simply. “Bathe carefully, and then we’ll see about fording the river.”

“And when are you going to sleep?” Damen wants to know. Laurent catches movement out of the corner of his eye, looks instinctively — sees Damen peeling cloth away, and a great deal of flesh on display — looks away just as fast. He doesn’t want to be reminded of how well-formed Damen is, for a human. “You didn’t get a chance earlier,” Damen goes on, muffled briefly as he pulls his tunic over his head. “You haven’t since we left. Can these lands be so flexible that you don’t need rest?” 

“I will be fine,” Laurent says testily, although he would dearly like some sleep. He’s not sleeping where the river’s banks might flood, not even with a watch. 

There is a long quiet, and then the sound of a body parting water as Damen tests the shallows. 

Laurent tries very, very hard not to look at him.

* * *

Damianos doesn’t become less of a complication as the days march up to Laurent’s birthday, but at least he’s a _quiet_ complication. It leaves room for Laurent to be on edge about everything _else_ that might be coming. He cannot for one moment believe that his uncle, so luxuriously accustomed to the power and authority that holding the Throne of Summer affords him, will so easily cede power to Laurent just because an arbitrary number of years has passed from Laurent’s birth and the old laws now deem him adult.

As it turns out, Laurent is right. Also, as per usual, he isn’t particularly happy to be right. Only satisfied, thin and bitter but perversely pleased that he predicted correctly. He has to take his victories somewhere.

It’s an old rite that his uncle invokes. Very old, and very petty. Technically, the way to prove his worth has to be _possible_ , or the magic won’t take, but—

“Bring home to Summer a way to end this war with the humans, once and for all,” the Regent says, nestled among the larch and birch with a comfort that implies to Laurent he does not plan to leave at any time in the near future. In the spiteful privacy of his own mind he likens the Regent to a parasitic fungus, and keeps a flat and calm face throughout. “Then, my nephew, I will grant that you are worthy of the throne. As it was then, so it is now: you may ask for help from none, take only what is freely given, and carry only yourself. The worth to prove is yours, not that of tools or subjects.”

Laurent regards the slick gold of magic weaving between them, wishing he could shake it off where his uncle’s touch sinks under his skin. It is only magic — in a few minutes it will feel simply like Laurent’s own energy — but all the same some part of him feels unclean. He wants to go and scrub for an hour, but that luxury isn’t going to be available in the foreseeable future. 

“I understand,” Laurent murmurs, which is the only response he can really give to this whole thing. 

“Return with the object of your quest, or do not return at all,” the Regent says, and the charge draws tight, more like a noose than a net. 

Laurent’s skin crawls with it. Surely it’s this temporary madness, and nothing more, that drives him into the loophole. “What of a _pet_?” Laurent says aloud, biting around the last word. 

His uncle knows exactly what he means, and Laurent can see the calculation when he dares flick a respectful glance up and then down and away. “If a pet will follow you without being asked,” the Regent says. “Why not?”

What Laurent suspects is that his uncle hopes the human will snap and kill Laurent, or that Laurent will snap and kill _him_ , and then his uncle can declare him an unfit ruler on those previously established grounds. The more fool him. Laurent already knows who Damianos is, will not be doing anything so foolish as taking him into his bed or confidence, and will certainly not be offering him an unguarded back. Just because the human has shown no signs of remembering who had tortured him, or indeed what precisely had happened to him, doesn’t mean he won’t, and if _that_ happens, he would be well within his inclinations to take some revenge. It’s all very precarious and twisted, in the ways of the old songs that end in blood and weeping.

But.

He suspects Damianos may do a lot for freedom. 

And Laurent can certainly lay out the facts of a situation without explicitly _asking_ for help. He knows how to slip around a geas, more or less. Any of the fae has a vested interest in being slippery with wordplay and promises, and Laurent in particular has made a study as much as a practice of it. 

As it turns out, Laurent barely has to ask. 

He has his clothes, he has the knife that was Auguste’s first and freely gifted to him, even if it was a very long time ago now. He hesitates over other options, considering what can be said to be uncomplicatedly, unreservedly his, and what there would be arguments about. Much of it is simply a function of his station, and was given to the prince of Summer, the orphaned heir, not Laurent, the summer-sky, whoever he is without the burden of blood and reign. His magic, of course, none can take from him... it probably is best to travel light, on the whole, and live from the land where it’s viable. 

There was a time he knew the lands of Summer better than he does now. 

When he looks, he finds Damianos in his chambers. Laurent’s stomach ties an unhappy knot about even the _concept_ of having to ask for help, to put himself at Damianos’s — not mercy. Never mercy. 

But Laurent will not be able to do this alone, and if there is any solution to the quest his uncle has set, it will be in human lands. In understanding where the humans have gotten their determination and arming against the fae, and in what may be done to turn them aside. 

It’s not the first time Laurent has thought of simply taking the banishment, but: below that temptation to give up, to step away from poisoned fruit and simply choose not to play, is the knowledge that the Regent, his uncle, will not be content while Laurent lives. The fact of his life is a threat. So it is impossibility or death. 

Damianos looks at Laurent — down, damn him, for the difference in their heights has not gotten any less pronounced — and the way he regards Laurent is perhaps the sharpest Laurent has seen from him yet. He could believe this man an educated prince. “I heard what happened,” he says, level. “Where will you go?” 

“It will have to be the human lands,” Laurent says, sizing Damianos up in turn. “Akielos, I suspect, since it is the closest on the border, and the source of most of our woes.”

He does see Damianos twitch. That’s satisfying. Laurent pretends he hasn’t seen it and keeps talking. “I do owe you my life, if you’ll recall. If you wished to call in that marker for your return home, that would be well within your rights and reason.” 

Damianos doesn’t immediately answer, just inclines his head. There is still something in his dark eyes that Laurent doesn’t understand and can’t name, and that bothers him more than anything else, that there should be some factor he can’t account for, something that may slip into his calculations and throw everything off-balance. “What about you?” Damianos wants to know. “What will _you_ do?”

Laurent has no answer for him. He can’t even begin to guess what the answer to the bigger question is, and he would need to know where he’s going in order to plan for it. Right now the only plan he has is to collect Damianos and venture off into the wild, toward Akielos, and hope that something becomes clear along the way. 

—well. A prince of Akielos might be able to shed some light on the whole thing, perhaps even do something about it, but that _is_ a bit much to count on. Besides, Laurent hears there’s a new king in Akielos these days. About since the time Damianos was given to him. He’s long since put those pieces together, too. 

“I suspect I shall be forced to improvise,” Laurent says, though it pains him physically to commit those words to some medium in which another person can hear him. “My uncle asks me to move the sun and moon, you see. I know not how it may be done, but I may at least begin by putting myself where such things may be reached. Why do you ask?”

“I only wondered,” Damianos says, and it is a little too quick to be entirely innocent. 

Laurent eyes him sidelong, and for several moments they have only this wary regard of each other, each assessing and neither quite understanding what the other means to do. Laurent can’t ask; he feels the binding stricture on his tongue, holding the question even if Laurent himself _had_ the humility to ask in this instance. Instead, all he can say is this: “My uncle’s motivations aside, peace is a worthy pursuit. Is it not?”

Damianos tilts his head to one side, and nods. “I will follow you,” he says then. He makes no other overt sign of respect, and Laurent is waiting for some other motivation to become apparent, some other shoe to drop, but there doesn’t seem to be anything. This is just Damianos, saying yes. “Like you said. It’s a worthy cause. And though the wonders of the court of Summer are — great — I would prefer to go home.” 

Laurent bites his tongue to avoid making any sound of humor. It isn’t funny; it’s just that Damianos has spoken around a great insult with an ease Laurent would call almost fae. It’s appropriate.

“Then I shall take you home,” Laurent says. “And if there happens to be danger along the way—“

Damianos’s teeth flash in a smile that is definitely more to the side of fierce than polite. “It’s practical to defend my guide,” he says. “Isn’t it?”

On this one thing, apparently, they may perfectly understand each other. Laurent refuses to breathe a sigh of relief, but he is, nevertheless, relieved.

* * *

The _noticing_ issue doesn’t get any better while they’re at the river. If anything it gets worse. Laurent listens to the sounds of Damen scrubbing himself clean of sap and blood and assorted other grime, and is mostly adept at keeping his eyes turned aside, but every so often there’s a sudden movement, or a splash not quite like the others, and Laurent looks instinctively before he can drag his eyes away. He keeps getting flashes of slick bare skin in the early dawnlight, of the way the water plasters Damen’s hair flat to the nape of his neck, of the bunch and stretch of thick muscle. The scars are on better display here, too, warping the long planes of Damen’s back into something else, something that was once reshaped like clay by an uncaring hand and still shows the marks.

Laurent doesn’t know precisely how he feels about these, but he’s unsettled and annoyed by the sharp pinpricks that keep nagging at him about it. Auguste’s murderer deserved worse—!

But _Damen_ has been almost nothing but helpful. Damen has risked his life to help Laurent. Damen has at least made an effort to understand the fae, to extend mercy in places it may or may not be deserved. Laurent is beginning to think...

He pushes that line of thought aside forcefully, as much because he doesn’t want to see where it goes as because he has other, more important things to worry about right now than the shape of a man and the concept of guilt. Laurent stands, stretches muscles gone stiff with sitting, and makes his best efforts to ward off sleep. He’ll need to eventually. Just— not yet. 

Not yet.

Eventually Damen hauls himself out of the river. Laurent’s gaze flicks over him with instinct before he can stop himself — there is damnable _heat_ in his face, and he absolutely refuses even the concept of this, turns himself physically away instead. “Satisfied?”

“It’s shallower than it looks, at least on this side,” Damen reports. “The current is strong, but not insurmountable if you’re prepared for it. I couldn’t tell how deep it might run in the middle, but it may not be as bad a crossing as you feared. ...Provided it stays in this state.”

Ah, he’s learning. Laurent nods fractionally. “Which can’t be completely relied on,” he says grimly. 

“Not completely,” Damen agrees, “but it’s been kind enough while we’re right here, hasn’t it? You could take some rest.”

“I don’t need it,” Laurent says automatically. 

Damen doesn’t immediately argue. Laurent listens for the sounds of cloth and leather and blade, assuming Damen will be getting dressed, and doesn’t hear anything like that at all. “What’s our course, then?” Damen asks finally. 

Laurent fights the sneaking suspicion that he’s still naked, and also the urge to turn around and check for himself instead of suspecting. “We’ll attempt to cross,” Laurent says, without yet turning around. “I don’t have an overwhelming need to bathe, so it might as well be now.” He moves toward the river bank gingerly, not quite looking at Damen; and then he _has_ to look at Damen, who is calmly wading into the shallows and is still very, very unclothed. “—what are you doing?”

There’s a pause. Damen looks at Laurent. Laurent keeps his eyes firmly above chin level. “Crossing the river,” Damen says, as if this should be obvious, as if _Laurent_ is the one who’s thick. He has a bundle in one hand, Laurent notes belatedly, and has propped it on his head — his clothes, probably. His sword is slung across his back in its sheath. “It’d be better to have dry clothes on the other side, even if they _are_ covered in tree. If it’s safe enough, we can stop for blade maintenance as well.”

“I can dry us off,” Laurent says, more sharply than he means. It isn’t— no. This is stupid. Why is he objecting so strongly to the concept of nudity? He is his own master, and none other; if he doesn’t want to be affected, he will not. He may not be made of ice like Winter’s get, but he has lived too much to be rendered scared and uncontrolled by _one naked human_.

Damen shakes his head, short but firm. “You should conserve your energy,” he says. “Especially if you refuse to sleep. We call that burning the candle at both ends.” 

“We have that saying too,” Laurent murmurs, and looks over deliberately now, having determined to face that which — absolutely doesn’t _frighten_ him, but does inconveniently distract him. 

Damen is very muscular. Laurent knew this. All the same, it is something different to see the slow slide of lingering water droplets down skin in the early morning light. Laurent drags his eyes up and down, making a note of every detail — the scar on his abdomen which Laurent actually isn’t responsible for, the heavy flesh between his legs, the shift of his thighs as he plants his stance against the current — and then Laurent fixes his gaze on Damen’s chin, and refuses to look anywhere else. 

He has the feeling that Damen has noticed him looking, but Laurent refuses shame for purging himself of a distraction. He tilts his head up a bit instead, a challenge if Damen opts to take it as one. “I’m fine,” Laurent says firmly. “We should go.”

For several long moments there is consideration from Damen, and Laurent can feel the weight of those dark eyes on him. Then Damen nods slightly, and turns his head to look at the opposing bank, and the gesture is pointed. “I think it’s best if we stay close together,” he says, and waits.

Laurent reminds himself that he cannot be _that_ angry about Damen doing something considerate— it is only that it bothers him to have been clearly understood, at least on some level, when he is actively trying not to be. He waits another moment to be sure that Damen is still focused on the riverbank, and then with brisk, precise gestures, Laurent begins to strip and bundle his clothes together, the copper dagger amid them all. He has nothing so heavy it can’t be carried out of the river, and unless the river goes very deep and turbulent all at once, Laurent is a strong enough swimmer to manage one-handed. Within the space of a minute or two Laurent is ready to go, and he plunges forward almost immediately when he is, reasoning that if he gives himself any pause he will find some way to delay or think further. The best way through, however, is to go ahead and get this over with. 

The water is up to his knees within the first few steps, and then he’s beside Damen, and made aware again of the size of them next to each other. Laurent hasn’t slacked in his physical training, but he’s lean where Damen has a frame that was made for massive, ruinous strength, and Laurent—

Laurent is _focusing on the task at hand_. 

The river, cold and pressing, demands his attention as they forge forward together, and prevents any physical reactions. Laurent picks his footholds carefully after that first rush, and tries not to shiver. He has to restrain the instinctive call to the summer-heat of his magic, too; the entire goal of this exercise is to minimize his magic use and conserve energy. It would be a poor waste of all this awkwardness if Laurent simply went ahead and wove warmth through his bones anyway. 

At the middle of the river it is still no higher than his heart. Laurent finds himself deeply suspicious. Despite the current, despite the shift of the rocks in the riverbed, this is too simple. There must be something more, something harder. 

Perhaps three-quarters of the way across Damen pauses, looks down, and Laurent pauses too. “There are fish,” Damen says, with some mild surprise. “They’re not trying to attack me.”

Laurent laughs short and sharp, and moves slowly over to see where Damen is looking. He’s gentle enough about it that he doesn’t ripple the water quite enough to scare the fish off, and soon he can see what Damen means — there are long silver-flickers of fish a little downriver, back and forth and certainly not immediately hostile. Laurent contemplates toothy or venomous fish, doesn’t let his guard down just to be on the safe side. And yet: nothing happens. 

“We should keep moving,” Laurent says at length; but Damen continues to look contemplative even as they do.

The last chunk of the crossing is alarmingly uneventful. Damen hauls himself dripping from the river to settle on the grassy bank, dropping his bundle almost immediately and reaching back to offer Laurent his hand. The sheer thoughtless ease of the gesture takes Laurent aback — he doesn’t dare take that hand. He doesn’t know what he would do with it. He clambers out of the river beside Damen instead, turning his head away. The grass will be happy enough to take the excess water away, more than likely, and Laurent sits down in it for a moment.

Damen does similarly, only with his feet in the river, and looking speculatively down into it. “Is there any way— how would I ask permission to fish?” he asks, some uncertainty around the edges of the question, and he aims a quick glance back at Laurent. “It didn’t seem like it was a good idea earlier. Here, though...”

It’s true that the river has been kind to them. The water makes it harder for Laurent to understand anything it might say to them, though he will admit he hasn’t tried very hard, either. When even the things that seem warmest and most familiar turn on him, why should he expect help here, in the places further from home, those places which are more unlike his magic and the sky and summer in him? 

Looking at Damen, and the way he waits Laurent’s word, making an effort to learn in foreign lands, Laurent is reminded that not _everything_ is his uncle’s, no matter how often it seems that way. 

Not everything has an edge hidden in it. 

Laurent grits his teeth, leans over and snags Damen’s hand, twining their fingers and plunging their hands into the river together. “Hold still,” Laurent says, and he murmurs to the spirit of the land, to the rushing water and the sheer joy of motion. There is an apology in it — he did not properly introduce himself, nor even really try to listen, after all — and a request. He doesn’t quite hear an answer; there is something that bubbles and hisses where he can’t hear it, a sound that could almost be language and might just be the random splash and pop of the water’s endless current. 

But nothing changes, either. The water doesn’t freeze or warm noticeably, and nothing fierce and fanged lunges from it to say them no. Laurent lets his breath out, realizes he still holds Damen’s hand and that there is a heat where skin touches skin, enough to out-burn the lingering chill of water. 

Laurent lets go of that with painfully deliberate movements, refusing to be anything but self-controlled. “It should be fine,” he says. “All the same, be careful.”

Damen nods, his eyes lingering on Laurent for too long a moment. “...your knife,” he says finally, as if he’s only just remembered. “May I borrow it?”

Laurent’s instinct is _no_ , not when it was his brother’s gift. How dare he—!

The iron sword will be poor weapon for killing and gutting fish. Laurent lets another measured breath out, and hands the blade over hilt-first with a jerky nod. If Damen loses it, Laurent will consider more drastic actions. Consider. “I’ll clean whatever you catch,” he says shortly. “Since you’ll want to take care of your sword.”

“Ah— right.” Damen looks briefly caught out, like he might have forgotten precisely _why_ the blade he carries is such an effective one, why Laurent went to great lengths to secure it from its original confiscation. Even if he couldn’t wield it, Laurent would make damned sure it couldn’t be used against him. 

And then Damen had been his best resort for company into the wilderness, against all odds and against all common sense. “It’s a deal,” Damen says then, and Laurent shakes off his contemplation, and watches as Damen drops heavily back into the river, moving off toward where he’d noted the fish.

* * *

In the end they sit there for some time. Laurent dries off while Damen’s at work fishing, and before very long is dressing again, with the same short, economical movements. Even the simplest of clothing feels like armor against the world, and he’s glad to be clad again. Certainly he won’t think on Damen’s form any longer.

Laurent thinks this until Damen comes out of the river with two long fish to lay beside Laurent, each already neatly killed with blows from the copper knife, and wanting only to be cleaned and cooked. Laurent turns his head aside from the long stretch of the man, from the competence so tidily exhibited in the fruit of the hunt, and holds his hand out for his knife. 

The hilt pressed into his hand is faintly damp but firm and familiar nevertheless. Laurent folds his fingers around it. “Take care of your own business,” he says instead of thanks, instead of any acknowledgment that there might be a favor owed. “I’ll look to these.”

It’s been a while since he tried his hand at any task like this, but old learning comes back to him with only a few hesitant strokes of the blade. He prepares the fish; he doesn’t look at Damen. Eventually there is the sound of cloth and finally the soft rasp of a blade against leather. Laurent assumes it must be safer now, probably more clothed, but he still doesn’t look. 

“Thinking about it,” Damen says, “I would have expected to be hungry before now. Is that— something to do with the land?” 

A fair question. “A little.” Laurent is most of the way done with the second fish, the first already stacked in progressively neater filets. He speaks as if he’s talking to the fish in front of him. “You’re still mine, by all rights, after all. Or by fae rights, which are rights enough for the lands of Summer.”

There is an odd silence. “I’m not sure I understood what that meant before,” Damen says, slow and quiet, and perhaps a little contemplative. “Am I weakening you?”

Laurent laughs before he can stop himself, sharp and startled and quickly bitten back behind his teeth again. “No. Nothing like that.” He wouldn’t give the human that _right_. To share in each other’s magic would be something for family or lovers, and Damen is emphatically neither of those. “It just means that in the lands of Summer, even as a human you’ll have a little of Summer in you; and we are the season of bright plenty, of fruitful branches and long days and more than enough to eat. And these travels... they are not what you would call linear.”

Damen is quiet for a while to think about this, apparently. Long enough for Laurent to finish with the second fish, and to bury what they won’t eat to feed whatever might grow there in the future. When Laurent finally gives in and looks over he finds that Damen is going over his sword with the tail end of his cloak. It’s hardly a whetstone or good oils, but it should, Laurent supposes, serve to keep the blade from rusting. There’s a faint frown on his face, a crease between his brows. 

Laurent doesn’t interrupt whatever thought process is going on there. Instead he turns his attention to their impending food. They could perhaps manage raw, if the fish doesn’t bear too much ill will, but Laurent had rather not chance it; but there’s no convenient driftwood nearby, and no bushes or trees, let alone any Laurent would feel sanguine about taking limbs from. He thinks about the whole reason they waded naked across the river, which included not wasting overmuch magic— but then again, they hadn’t looked to be easily fed when that decision was made. 

Laurent also doesn’t know when he’ll properly get the chance to sleep again. All the same, as far as uses of magic go, he rather thinks cooking is among the less frivolous. He spins it between his hands, draws it out of him with — more effort than he likes. 

He’s fine.

The heat of the stove, the burn of the sun. The web like a red-hot iron between his fingers. Laurent scoops the neatly cut fish up and laces that magic through it, around it, and there is the sizzle and sear of rapidly-cooking meat, and the scent splits the air sharp and fast, all the stronger for how quickly Laurent has done it. Damen’s head picks up sharply. “—you shouldn’t have,” he says, distracted from whatever else he’d been thinking of. “Your resources—“

“I’m _fine_ ,” Laurent repeats, despite that he really could use to rest. Bristling and striking back is instinctive and easy. “We’re about to eat, aren’t we? I know my own limits a _bit_ better than a human does, thanks for your concern.” 

The thanks are sharply, pointedly insincere. Damen closes his eyes, and his lips move quietly. Is he _counting_? He is. Spite twines uncomfortably around a vague sense of guilt in Laurent’s chest. 

“I’m depending on you, _your highness_ ,” Damen says plainly, when he looks up again. There’s an equal bite in the title, just as pointed and unhappy with Laurent. “Without you, I won’t have any hope of making it out of the fae lands alone. I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to manage your magic, but soldiers need to keep strength up, too. The principles of endurance are the same, magic or no.”

It doesn’t soothe any of the prickles in Laurent, to know that it comes from a place of pure practicality instead of something more condescending. But— he suspects there’s nothing really that would completely settle him. He doesn’t _want_ to be settled, on some level. 

“Do you need to rest further?” Laurent asks. 

Damen’s eyes narrow faintly. “At least I had some.”

Sleeping would be nice. Laurent is pretty sure he’d never be able to, with Damen watching over him. By way of distraction he just shoves half the fish at Damen; but the look he gets in exchange even as Damen takes the offered meal suggests to Laurent that he hasn’t heard the end of this all yet.

* * *

They have the discussion again when the meal is done, after Laurent has thanked the river and is stretching out his legs. It’s no more fruitful for either of them, honestly. “It would be a waste of time,” Laurent says. “We should just keep moving.”

“Insomnia?” Damen asks, with the level low tone that sounds like it doesn’t intend to take no for an answer. 

“Paranoia,” Laurent answers with a sharp dryness. 

They move on, mostly because Laurent quickens his pace and Damen has to keep up or be left behind, and then the land starts to change again as they travel. Grassland becomes moister and soggier, and where trees crop up they are of a different sort from that before. Laurent realizes they’ve traded field for fen properly around the time he starts sinking to the ankle in soft, sucking mud on most of his steps. 

He never did spend much time in places like this, swamp and fen and wetland, even under Auguste’s auspices. He knows enough academically to be sure the Summer lands don’t usually turn to wetland anywhere close to the court, but that’s about it— and it’s not like there’s all that many hard and fast rules in the fae lands, where things can change as quickly as the flash of a fish’s scales in the river.

Such places are prone to treacherous ground even when they occur in the human countries. Laurent expects that with the life of the fae and the Summer breathing through it, this particular stretch of land will be even more... interesting, to put it mildly.

As per usual, Laurent isn’t particularly pleased to be proven right about the pitfalls of his immediate future. The fog creeps up gradually — bare tendrils at first, then something heavier, greyish-white and obscuring. Laurent steps into something far deeper than the mud he’s been traversing so far and bites his cheek in lieu of cursing. In control. He’s in control of himself. Damen steadies him and Laurent shakes it off— he’s fine. He’s fine. 

“We should stay close, I think,” Damen says, though he removes his hand without other argument when Laurent shoves it away.

“I thought I’d been saying that all along,” Laurent snips. It’s not a disagreement. He tests his footing more carefully as they move on, and Damen is too wary of what’s around them to get suckered into a verbal argument, more’s the pity.

It gets harder and harder to walk. Laurent’s muscles ache with the pull against mud and water, with the strain of keeping balance on ground he can’t see, and it weighs his shoulders down even as lighter layers of fog settle over the fen, nearly up to his thighs now. Anything shorter than that becomes barely a shadow in the distance, and more than once he stubs his toe or trips over something — a stone, a bone. He’s only grimly satisfied to note that Damen is faring no better. 

Laurent tries to listen to the fen, he really does. Tries to speak to it, to murmur greeting and cajoling words. But whatever spirit is in this place isn’t one he can understand, can barely even hear — there’s just the barest of muted sounds. He doesn’t know if he’s imagining the menace in the way the fog expands, can’t tell if the weight on his shoulders is a natural exhaustion or a sneaking fatigue brought on by magic. If it’s the latter, it’s subtle; if it’s the former... well, Damen’s been telling him to sleep. 

Too late now. Laurent grits his teeth and grimly forges ahead anyway. If he keeps telling himself he’s fine, eventually it’ll sink in and he’ll believe it. 

He nearly walks into a tree, one that looms out of the fog far too abruptly for his liking. Laurent stops himself short with his face nearly against it, presses his hand to the bark. It doesn’t feel real somehow, this gray bark; perhaps it gives too easily, or perhaps it’s that the grain makes strange patterns. He can’t quite tell. Laurent takes a careful step back, passes his hand across his eyes as though that will clear the fatigue from them, and looks around to take stock again.

He can’t see very far. They’ve waded into the fog like an ocean, like just another river, and now they’re surrounded by it. Laurent’s breath mists softly out, that and Damen’s solid presence at Laurent’s shoulder starting to seem like the only things that are actually true in this place. Laurent takes a moment to imagine it if he were alone, and then one more to wince infinitesimally at the imagining. He’d prefer not to be _completely_ adrift.

“Did you see that?” Damen asks, barely a moment later. Laurent checks back quickly — Damen has his sword loosened, ready for a draw, and his gaze darting somewhere past Laurent. It’s easy enough to look where he’s looking, but there’s nothing there. Nothing but curling fog, and perhaps a distant shadow to say there will be a tree in some unreasonably unpredictable distance.

“What did you see?” Laurent takes two steps in that direction and stops as soon as he realizes Damen is frozen to the spot, making no move to follow. 

“I don’t,” Damen says haltingly. “I thought it was— no. I must have imagined it.”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that,” Laurent says, made more tart by the grey exhaustion nagging at the edges of his eyes and consciousness. “You may not have, depending on what it is.”

Damen is quiet for a long few moments. He pries his feet up to take those few steps after Laurent, coming close again. There’s something slow and deliberate about the way he does it, and Laurent swears Damen brings a little more heat with him, that the presence at his shoulder is warmer than should be possible. “People have stumbled across the border into the fae lands before,” he says eventually. “You said as much. But— if I saw someone I know, here—“

Laurent’s expression tightens. He mislikes what that says, too. Fog is one thing, exhaustion yet another; but if this fen is going to be spinning _illusions_ at them, getting out just became much, much more urgent. “It happens,” Laurent allows. “But I don’t see anyone. I would suspect there’s something misleading at work here.”

“Have you heard anything?”

As much as Laurent appreciates that Damen really is learning, he sincerely does not appreciate admitting any failing. He presses his mouth flat and shakes his head. “It’s opaque to me.” 

“We couldn’t have passed out of fae lands without noticing?” Damen tries. Laurent mentally revokes half of the appreciation previously given; but Damen’s already waving that off. “No, I know. You would have noticed, wouldn’t you?”

Grudgingly Laurent settles and nods. “We’re still in the lands of Summer, if barely,” he says. “As you said. Now, more than ever, we must stay close.”

Damen rolls his shoulders. “All right,” he says, and holds out his off-hand. 

Laurent stares at this for several moments before realizing what Damen means him to do with it. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’d prefer to have my hands free too, but it’s the easiest way,” Damen says firmly. “If we need to fight something we can let go, but if we tied ourselves together we’d run the risk of tangling on something. Or each other, which would be worse.”

He makes more sense than Laurent likes. Laurent eyes the outstretched hand for another long few seconds before finally nodding, tiny and jerky, and reaching out in exchange. Damen laces his fingers through Laurent’s calmly, and, damn him, squeezes gently. “Let’s go, then,” he says, just as Laurent is about to snap something about not needing to be gentled like a wild animal.

Damen’s hand is warm and fortifyingly solid. Laurent opts not to snap at him, just for this time and place. Together, they press forward. 

* * *

In the end it’s Laurent’s fault. He has any number of excuses — he’s tired, the fen is made of illusions, the visions know how to cut to the quick of him, how was he supposed to stand still — but it’s still his fault, his own doing. A figure steps out of the fog, suddenly startlingly clear amid all the haze and blurriness, and Laurent sees the familiar shape of his brother, tall and golden and perfect, as if he’d never been cut down iron-frozen and almost unrecognizable for it. Laurent draws his breath in sharp and grips the hand in his tight, so tight it hurts, and then—

—he realizes he’s holding the hand of his brother’s murderer all over again, as Auguste smiles at him so, so gently—

—everything curdles inside Laurent, all hate and guilt and shame and grief, and he twists his hand out of Damen’s and runs. As fast as the fen will let him, as desperately as he hasn’t since he was thirteen. Laurent runs, and he hears Damen call after him, and he remembers that he should look back, remembers that there was some good reason not to run ahead or separate, but it’s far too late when he does. The only difference that remembering makes is that Laurent stops sooner rather than later; and by the time he does, Damen has vanished into the fog.

Laurent is hopelessly lost, he realizes, but it doesn’t matter. After all, Auguste is in front of him still, holding out his hand. “Little brother,” he says. “There you are. Laurent.”

Surely this must be a lie. There’s something missing from him, Laurent thinks. Some essential warmth that was there in his life. The touch of Summer, the warmth of love. 

“I missed you,” Laurent tells the thing that looks so very much like his brother. He can’t seem to help it. 

Auguste tilts his head and smiles gently. “Oh, Laurent,” he says. “You’re fighting so hard. You don’t have to, you know. It’s all right to rest.”

“I can’t yet,” Laurent argues, stubborn to the last. “I haven’t— finished anything.”

“Were you ever going to?” Auguste wants to know. Something is wrong with his eyes, or perhaps his smile, but Laurent can’t place it— not when his brother is so many years dead, and all his own memories colored with childhood and nostalgia, those sweet times when all seems good upon looking back. 

“Of _course_ ,” Laurent says sharply. “I’m not going to let our uncle— anything. This quest is a setback, but I’ll find a way.”

“I was asking about Damianos,” Auguste says. It’s still sweet — more or less — but his smile has faded. “You’ve had every opportunity to kill him, Laurent.”

Laurent is well aware of this. “It would be difficult to justify now,” he says, very nearly by rote. “If I kill him, Uncle will use it as reason for some further challenge to my fitness to rule. I can’t risk it.”

“But you’ve always been so bright, Laurent,” Auguste cajoles. It’s difficult to look at him, Laurent finds. “Surely you can think of a way to work around that. Wouldn’t ending the hostilities between our peoples be so much easier if the human prince was dead?”

It sounds for a moment very tempting; then Laurent shakes his head, slow but insistent. “Maybe,” he says. “It would be— irresponsible. An abuse of power. I won’t do it.” 

Maybe later, he tells himself. Later, when they are on an equal ground, and Laurent can carve him apart piece by piece in a fair fight. 

That honestly doesn’t sound as satiating as Laurent had once hoped it might be. And he thinks— thinks of a warm hand in his, and Damen’s continuing calm insistence that he take care of himself—

“Is there something in his eyes you like?” Auguste’s voice— that isn’t right, either. Laurent closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at his brother’s face, and the wearing exhaustion nags at him again. He could just sleep. The illusion wouldn’t bother him then. He wouldn’t have this moral crisis then. Wouldn’t have to deal with his uncle. 

—that’s a dangerous line of thought. Laurent opens his eyes with a force of will, only to find Auguste right there in front of him, the golden shades of him gone pale and tarnished. “He saved my life,” Laurent says then, the only defense he can muster in the face of this. 

“He killed me,” Auguste says. Somehow the lack of venom makes it worse. Laurent turns his face away now. 

It doesn’t help.

“Oh, Laurent.” Auguste’s voice is rich with something like and unlike sympathy. “You’ve been fighting so hard, haven’t you? Just abandon the human and come back to me. I’ll take care of everything.”

Laurent sways on the spot. Even knowing it is an illusion, that whatever it promises — cannot be true — he’s so tired. The imagining of Auguste returning, of his brother making everything better, taking care of Laurent just like everything used to be — it’s a powerful lure, one that drags at Laurent’s bones. A world where he doesn’t have to worry about his uncle, doesn’t have to be constantly on guard. Doesn’t have to deal with the strange, conflicted feelings he notes when he looks at the human, the electric _awareness_ that sits in his limbs and makes it impossible to look away from anything at all. 

“I’ll take that revenge, even if you won’t kill him yourself,” Auguste says, all coaxing and convincing. “All you have to do is let go, don’t you? Without you, he won’t last here in our lands, and if you revoke your claim on him, even better. Summer won’t know him any longer, and he can feed our ancestors and our children just like humans were meant to do.”

Laurent thinks of laying down, of closing his eyes and resting, of long days in the sun and his brother’s eternal company. He wants it so badly he aches with it, like there are hooks in his chest that pull him toward Auguste, like one embrace would undo all the years of narrow, pinching loneliness. “Not like this,” he says, but with Auguste at the corner of his vision and the thoughts of what could be filling up his mind, it’s a weak protest. 

“It’s the kindest way,” Auguste says. “The easiest way.” He moves, drifting into Laurent’s direct line of sight again, and reaches out, his hand open and beckoning. As if all Laurent would have to do is take it and everything would be well again, simple as that. He wouldn’t even need to think about his uncle again. And...

He can’t seem to remember why he keeps saying no, only that he has his heels dug in. Laurent rubs at his eyes, trying to scatter the fog in his sight, keep himself awake a little while longer, even though he’s so very tired. Motes of light spot across his vision for a few moments, white-gold and searing, and are gone just as fast. He can’t think what he’s missing. He can’t _think_.

But he could trust Auguste to keep watch while he sleeps, couldn’t he? That would solve all the problems. Auguste knows how fae lands work, and everyone and everything likes to listen to him. Laurent won’t need to worry about waking up eaten or injured, or not waking up at all. And Auguste is _offering_ help— Laurent hasn’t asked. He still meets those strictures. Yes. That answer might be the best of all the available options. “We can just rest for a little while,” Laurent murmurs aloud, rubbing his eyes again. 

Something’s still wrong.

Auguste will fix it, though, won’t he? Laurent finds his brother’s face, even wan as it is, and surely this should be only a good thing. Earlier hesitations almost completely wiped away, Laurent reaches for his hand. 

“— _LAURENT!_ ”

The voice cuts the daze. Laurent freezes where he is. He knows that voice, why does he know that voice? Surely he’s never heard it say his name before; but all the same, he thinks there’s something about the timbre he should know and remember. 

“Ignore it,” Auguste says gently. “Sometimes the lands will trick us, you know this.”

Laurent does know this, doesn’t he. “Just... give me a moment,” he says, slowly, distractedly. Wherever he knows that voice from is probably important.

“No more wasting time, Laurent,” Auguste presses. Laurent — can’t see him immediately, such is the fog, and when he does see him again there’s something strange about his proportions. His arms too long, perhaps, and his eyes too wide, too bright. “Come now. Just let everything go for me.”

“I have to,” Laurent starts. What does he have to do?

“Laurent—!”

The voice is closer now. There’s sounds of splashing, of wood splitting, all chaos and noise encroaching. Laurent definitely won’t be able to get a rest like this, but— with every sound, he thinks more clearly. That’s—

“ _There_ you are!”

A human, tall and muscled, dark curls just off his forehead, dressed in the colors of Summer and holding a long and ruinous iron sword. He takes up space in the fen suddenly, without asking or apologizing for it, and the fog recoils where the sword passes, leaving tracks of clear air behind it, and a scent like the clearest morning and dew on the grass. Damianos, Laurent recognizes, and “ _Damen_ ,” says his mouth, surprise bypassing his better thoughts into pure instinct.

Damianos, who is setting his sword against Auguste—

Grieving memory like a knife stabs at Laurent. “ _Stop!_ ” he cries out, and expects it to do no good, expects this time that he will _witness_ his brother’s murder—

Muscles stand out stark and strong, effort clearly applied: but to halt momentum, not to strike. Damianos holds his blade still, frozen and merciful, and purely on Laurent’s word. Laurent stands just as frozen, one hand flung forward as though it will help, and his heart an insistent, panicked beating against the inside of his ribs. _What now_?

“Is the human for me, Laurent?” Auguste wants to know, tilting his head birdlike. The gesture is wrong. The brother is wrong. 

“No,” Laurent says, quite firmly, and gathers himself. “No. The human is mine.”

“I thought you meant to put all affairs of humans and court aside.” Now Auguste’s attention is all on Laurent, despite that there’s a sword still pointed at him, something iron and heavy. Laurent’s thoughts slow like honey in the depth of winter. 

“You must know that can’t be your brother,” Damianos says then, low and insistent. Perhaps his voice carries some of the iron of his sword, for it follows the chill slowness with warmth. 

Laurent rubs at his eyes again. Light scatters. Auguste begins to look less like himself, more like a translucent shell. “I know,” he says in an equally quiet tone. “I can’t _think_ , Damianos. Don’t— don’t stop talking.” For Laurent has at least grasped the realization, somewhere in the shaded corners of his mind, that Auguste’s voice is dangerous, that the more he talks the worse it gets. He would prefer not to drown today.

Damianos draws his breath in sharply. “—you know,” he says. “How long?”

“How long _what_?” Laurent slants an irritable glance toward Damianos, specifically for his poorly-timed non sequitur. This is hardly the time for joking. 

There is another, more careful breath. “In the court,” says Damianos, “I was called _Damen_.”

Laurent realizes his mismatch very late indeed and bites his tongue. Too little, too late. “...ah,” he says, inadequately. “As I said. I can’t think.” Auguste is still _there_ , insubstantial as he is, and his eyes are equal measures inhuman and pleading, and there is something about Damianos, about Damen arrayed against Auguste, that catches Laurent on spearpoint and won’t let him think of anything else.

“Then don’t,” Damen says. He eyes Auguste with some wariness, but finally, improbably, lowers his sword, and offers his free hand toward Laurent. “We can just go, can’t we? This place seems to like tricks over outright attacks. Perhaps I don’t know it the way you do, but I think— if we just left, we might manage.”

Laurent stares at that hand, then at Auguste’s, and it is like everything in him is screaming at everything else. The two hands are so very different, and the answer should be so obvious, it’s only...

Auguste.

“Just let him go, Laurent,” Auguste says softly. “You can have me back. You never need to worry about our uncle again. This will be our home, and it will be whatever we need it to be, and all shall be well, I promise you.”

“Don’t,” Damen says, almost immediately on the heels of Auguste’s words. “It’s not real.”

“Are you?” Auguste counters. “If I’m not real, what says you are?”

The hesitation implies Damen doesn’t have an immediate answer for that, but— “ _Laurent_ ,” he says, more insistent. Perhaps Laurent is his answer. 

“Laurent,” Auguste repeats, and turns his head — pale, bloodless, wrong — toward Laurent. “Little brother, don’t let him kill me again.”

The flinch shakes Laurent’s whole body without his permission. He takes a step, but not toward either of them, just to the space between, and Damen lowers his sword further. Perhaps to avoid Laurent; perhaps to prove he’s not a threat to Auguste. Either way, it draws Laurent’s attention, and Laurent remembers what it is: iron.

The fog fled it. 

“Give me your sword,” Laurent says to Damen.

“It’ll hurt you,” Damen warns, but he doesn’t question it otherwise, just holds the hilt out. 

“What are you doing?” Auguste demands. The closer the sword is, the more Laurent sees what isn’t right in him— the gaunt stretches, the sharp edges, all the things that were neither human nor fae but something made of wood and stone, rotten and sharp and drowning. 

“You’re already dead, Auguste,” Laurent tells him, and reaches toward Damen. “Goodbye.”

“Laurent, no—“

Laurent grasps the blade of the sword in one swift motion, before he can lose his nerve, and never minds the sharp edge. It’s cold, so cold it hurts, it burns even as it freezes, and Laurent screams and _screams—_

But his mind is clear, and the fog coils back as Laurent falls to his knees in the muck, and Auguste is gone. 

Damen pries Laurent’s hand off the sword, murmuring some gentle nonsense, and Laurent clutches the injury to his chest, panting. His throat is raw, and everything shakes, and his brother is still gone, will _always be gone_ , and with him is the human who killed him, and somehow—

Somehow, through all that, Laurent isn’t aching any more.

* * *

“I won’t thank you for it,” Laurent had said, sharply, that day after Damen had stood against Winter with him, saved his life. Laurent had been all edges then, unsure and shaken by his turned-sideways worldview.

The Damianos of then had kept his eyes slanted aside, his demeanor just this side of respectful. “If I worked for thanks, I’d never do anything,” he had murmured; but there was a dry edge about it, something Laurent hadn’t heard in him before. Sun and sky help him, he liked it.

Laurent had not dignified that with an answer.

* * *

It’s Damen who leads them out of the fen, sword in one hand and Laurent’s good hand in the other. They don’t talk. Laurent thinks of the simple warmth of another person touching him and can’t even begin to muster something to say. 

Slowly the ground becomes easier to tread, less of mud and more of earth. Slowly the trees recede. There is a sky overhead in a deep rich blue that could be dusk or could be dawn. Laurent doesn’t honestly care, except for how tired he is, all of it hitting him like a stone as soon as they’re out of the immediate danger. Then, of course, he catches his own mind at tricks, catches himself thinking that Damen is _safe—_

He doesn’t even have the energy to make himself standoffish again. 

The first inkling that they might be coming up on something more is a signpost. It’s bleached white with years of sun and wind, and slanted at a heavy angle, but it still stands somehow. Damen leans to read it, glances along the suggestion of a path both ways, and nods to himself before looking back at Laurent. There is a question in his face; Laurent can’t hope to guess what it is. 

“All right,” Damen says instead of asking, and he squeezes Laurent’s hand, and directs them off down the path. 

Laurent wants to be indignant about the gesture, the familiarity like Damen has the right in intimacy, but being angry sounds like a great deal of effort. 

Eventually there are fenceposts. They’re not very good fenceposts, and there’s nothing contained by them, but Laurent can clearly see where someone once tried to wall off a little section of the wild. Damen pauses thoughtfully there, and Laurent pauses with him, and it takes him some time to realize Damen actually has said something to him. “—what?”

“Are these still Summer’s lands?” Damen repeats, without any trace of the impatience Laurent would surely have had in his place.

The trouble is that Laurent has to think about it. He closes his eyes — oh, but to sleep, but he _can’t_ , he still sees Auguste — and thinks about the feel of the earth under his feet. Is it warm? Certainly. Is it all that it could be...? 

“The outskirts, I think,” Laurent says carefully. When he opens his eyes he’s swaying; he stops doing that with an effort of will. “Still fae, but much closer than we were to the human lands.” 

“I can see buildings,” Damen says, and tugs gently at Laurent’s hand. He hasn’t let go yet. It’s probably impertinent. 

All the same, Laurent follows after him, toward these supposed buildings. He feels like he should know what this is, but it’s taking forever to find the memory that tells him what it is. The poor field becomes a little shelter, maybe for a shepherd or a flock. Damen moves close enough that he can see into that, shakes his head, and tugs them back onto the path. In some time there are more buildings, all the same wood that’s weathered to near-white, some falling apart. Laurent doesn’t have to look inside to assume that no one’s been here in some time. 

No humans, at least. “Ah,” he says, as the memory twigs slowly, as if from a very long way away. “This is— one of the reclaimed lands, I think.”

“Reclaimed lands?” Damen makes a thoughtful noise. It’s a little village, or it was, once. In the central clearing, probably what passes for a town square, there’s a solid stone well; he takes Laurent that way. “I think we call them something else...”

“You would,” Laurent says, and can’t seem to put heat into it. “Humans settled these lands and made them theirs with iron nails and salted borders, to kill the life in the land. It wouldn’t last forever. Eventually, some court takes them back. It’s only fair.” 

“What happened to the people?” Damen leans his sword against the well and hauls at the bucket. The rope snaps, but there’s a heavy splash below; there’s still water in it. Damen frowns. 

“I don’t know,” Laurent says honestly. Perhaps they left, when the shifting of the land and the whispers of fae promises got too much. Perhaps the land used their bones for fertilizer, to regrow what was once cut off. Either way, Laurent doesn’t feel like going into detail. “I can fix the rope.”

“After you’ve slept,” Damen says, curtailing Laurent’s reach. Laurent scowls at him, alert enough for that much at least; Damen transfers the earlier frown to him instead. “You look—“

Damen cuts himself off. Laurent raises his eyebrows, waiting for whatever word that was going to be, inviting Damen to say something foolish.

“Sick,” Damen says finally, reclaiming his sword and sheathing it. “Maybe one of these houses has a bed left.”

There’s an equal chance the insides of the houses will be overgrown or rotted to nothing. Laurent says nothing about this, just follows. It’s too much effort to argue, and they’ll see soon enough. 

Damen tries a few houses, Laurent trailing, and eventually is forced to admit that solid walls and a working door are the best they’re going to get. Inside Damen lays his cloak out — the floor is hard-packed dirt and some determined grass, and the cloak will hardly make it softer, but it’s a start. “I’ll keep watch,” Damen says, and gestures to the space so laid out. 

Laurent stares at the indicated place and just shakes his head. “I can’t,” he says. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine,” Damen says. “Talk to me. What’s stopping you?”

His brother’s murderer is the only one to keep watch over him. Laurent bites his tongue on that. At least three times over, now, Damen has stepped in on his behalf. If he sets aside that particular issue...?

“...you know who I am,” Damen says, apparently taking Laurent’s lack of answer as an answer in itself. “We didn’t speak of it. Is that what it is?”

Laurent doesn’t _want_ to speak of it. He tests his heart against the feeling when Damen had agreed to help, those moments of relief at not being alone. It sits maybe a little better. Would there be _anyone_ he would trust to keep watch over him in the wilds? “No,” he says at length. “Not specifically. I find that... I have forgotten how to trust anyone at all.” 

This, too, Damen takes in, his dark eyes grave and thoughtful. “I do not know there is any oath I could offer that your heart would believe,” he says. “If you cannot trust even my own self-interest to see us both alive, what more can I give you?”

“I don’t know,” Laurent says, and hates how his voice sounds. He is so, so tired. “I will... try.”

Damen retreats politely to the furthest corner, giving Laurent space as he pulls off his boots and scrunches his own cloak up to put under his head. As Laurent predicted, the ground is hard. It softens perhaps a little under him, Summer giving just a touch of its warmth to its errant child, but it doesn’t make all that much difference. Laurent closes his eyes and thinks about sleep, dark and heavy. 

He almost has it, but as the time passes dazed and dim, he can’t hear what Damen is doing. What if— gone, or doing something worse? Laurent cracks his eyes open, finds Damen’s shape lit only barely by starlight through the gaps in wood. Still there. Hasn’t moved from his watchful position. All right. Laurent closes his eyes again; but in a few minutes he only needs that same assurance again, and if it’s not _that_ then it’s the flicker of Auguste, the fear of the dark and the solitude and water and chill closing over his head—

Laurent sits up after that one. “I can’t,” he repeats, his throat hurting with it. 

“You keep looking for me,” Damen says neutrally.

Suspicion is natural. Laurent rolls his eyes anyway. “The last time I looked away from you for any significant length of time, a tree ate you. And the fen—“

Damen is silent. It’s easier for Laurent to talk like that, in this half-waking state, barely able to see Damen. “—it wanted me to rest,” Laurent says then, his voice rasping over the words. “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. I _can’t_.”

He sounds terribly pathetic even to himself. All the same he isn’t expecting it when Damen stands, closes the distance between them again and crouches down by Laurent. This close even with the poor light Laurent can see the shape of him picked out clearly enough — his shoulders, the inclination of his head, the shape of his mouth. “You sleep lightly anyway,” Damen says.

Not quite a question, but Laurent nods regardless. It’s been true for years.

“Hear me out before you say no,” Damen says. This is not a promising start, but Laurent presses his lips together and waits. “Let me hold you.”

Laurent starts to say something cutting on general principle, but Damen raises his hand and ducks his head, asking for just a moment’s grace. Grudgingly Laurent quiets, and Damen goes on. “I’ll leave my sword where I can’t reach it. If you’re leaning against me, you’ll know where I am at all times, and if I move too much, you’ll wake.”

It may be testament to Laurent’s sleep deprivation that this makes sense. “I suppose you couldn’t feel further from wetland if you tried. I don’t...”

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember what it’s like to completely trust anyone, and wonders if this is what it is: not something unconscious, but making a choice to try, even when each different fear clamors for attention like a baby bird. 

He’s so, so tired still. Laurent closes his eyes. “Leave your sword by the door,” he says, and he hears Damen move to comply without question.

Damen’s footsteps are easy to track. Perhaps that’s his courtesy. All the same Laurent flinches when Damen lays a hand on his shoulder— he doesn’t mean to, but such touches are few and far between. “It’s just me,” Damen says, and Laurent lets out a sharp, sudden knife of a laugh. 

“...I suppose I deserved that,” Damen says then, but he moves again, nudging Laurent up so he can settle behind him. 

Laurent firmly vetoes spooning, mostly by elbowing Damen in the chest. In the end what winds up most comfortable is Damen leaning against the wall, Laurent laid back against his chest, between his legs— there are significant layers of cloth between them, and Laurent is certainly not thinking about anything else in this position. _Definitely_ not. It is enough that Damen is warm and solid and real, and as much as it pains Laurent to admit it, he is already far more comfortable. 

Damen wraps his arms around Laurent, over his chest, and Laurent hooks a hand on top. It is only to keep track of where Damen is, he tells himself, and for once knows for sure that he is lying. The rise and fall of Damen’s chest under him is more soothing than anything else.

Once more, Laurent closes his eyes and tries to sleep. He’s half-expecting the hitch in his consciousness to come, runs mental checks over what might disrupt him just in case— but there’s only Damen. Not eaten by a tree nor trying to kill him. Laurent’s head drops back against Damen’s shoulder, gracelessly comfortable, and he is barely conscious of how Damen leans his head not back, but against Laurent in turn.

This time when he approaches the border of sleep, there is nothing further to stop him, and he slips across in warm safety.

* * *

They get a very late start in the morning. 

Laurent wakes before Damen — he thinks. He’s conscious of a great warmth and comfort, and above all he doesn’t want to move, so much so that he slits his eyes open only barely, only to check their situation, instead of an appropriate wariness. He hadn’t thought, last night, of who would keep the guard if Damen was holding Laurent to sleep— but it seems not to have been an issue. For once. 

Damen’s arms are heavy around him, and there is a lingering feeling of security. Laurent could weep for the irony.

He doesn’t, though. He’s not that far gone. He just waits, warm and settled, and somehow when Damen stirs, disentangling himself is a reluctance and not an awkwardness. 

The first thing Laurent does is weave healing for his own hand. He goes over Damen next, despite Damen’s protests, just to see if all is well there — it transpires there are some lingering bumps and bruises from the fen and Damen’s panicked rush after Laurent, but nothing further. Outside Laurent weaves a new rope for the well out of sunshine and spiderwebs, and they drink deep of cool, sustaining water.

Damen looks different to Laurent’s eyes. He knows why that is, now, even if he doesn’t know how to voice it. Yet. 

“What will you do when we get to the human lands?” Damen wants to know as they set out. “I have to assume we’re close.”

“Very close,” Laurent says, eyes distant as he feels for Summer. They leave the village behind them, and he nearly can’t sense the land’s spirit any more, only the last tenuous threads. It’s alien. It’s terrifying. Laurent takes Damen’s off-hand without thinking about it, leaving his sword hand clear just in case. It’s just— easier. That’s all. He’s not going to say anything about the warm regard when Damen looks back at him. 

“ _Can_ you leave the fae lands?” Damen asks then.

“It won’t be comfortable, but yes.” Laurent flicks his shoulders in a quick shrug, aggressive, pushing the concern away. “I must do so, anyway. Whatever way there is to end the conflicts between our countries — to bring peace — it won’t be in the fae lands. Not like this.”

There is quiet for some several moments, and the sun overhead a blessing as the last of the Summer lands begins to drain away from Laurent. 

“Come with me,” Damen says then. “I need— to go home. I need answers. But I think my answers may be in the same place as yours.” 

“The King of Akielos.” Laurent notes the minuscule tightening in Damen’s expression. He already has his own very significant guesses about why. “Yes. You’re not wrong. Our bargain was to the border, and we are there, but— I could use a guide. If you are... offering.”

He can’t ask. It sounds like an offer from Damen, but he has to be sure. 

Chilliness sweeps over Laurent with his next several steps and he pauses, suddenly breathless, trying to cope. He’s never been so completely unmoored from his homeland before, from everything that makes him— him. He lifts his free hand curiously to the sun, half-expecting it to be translucent, that he should be only a shade of himself here. He’s almost surprised to find himself solid. 

Damen tugs at Laurent’s hand until Laurent looks at him; and then, very deliberately, holding Laurent’s gaze all the while, Damen lifts their joined hands and kisses Laurent’s knuckles. 

Laurent forgets how to breathe at the tender catch of his lips. Ah, this thing that sits between them, the unnamed heat and electricity — Damen knows it too, doesn’t he? 

“You said you would grant me my freedom,” Damen says then, “but there is nothing that says I cannot choose to show you the way regardless.”

Suspicion rears its head again, as it so often does with Laurent, as Laurent has learned to encourage it to. Once he has formally renounced all his claim on Damen, there truly is nothing stopping Damen from simply walking off, or turning his sword on Laurent, freeing him from all obligation that might cling to him. There will be no failsafe, nothing but Damen’s good nature and the nebulous hope of a future where their lands coexist kindly, where human and fae do not strip the life out of each other bit by bit, in iron and in wild.

Trust really is a choice. One like standing on the edge of a cliff shrouded in fog, unable to see if there is water or stone below. 

“Summer has no chains on you,” Laurent says softly. “Any debt you owed to me is paid. Go where you will, Damianos, and let nothing bind your feet. I renounce the claim that was given to me.”

As he speaks magic untethers itself, the faintest threads of gold unpeeling from somewhere under Damen’s skin to dull and vanish. Damen barely flinches, only bows his head over Laurent’s hand, and straightens without letting go. Regardless of all his reasoned thoughts, Laurent’s heart is in his throat. 

But:

“Let’s go, then,” says Damen, still holding his hand, and Laurent’s heart remembers what it feels like to fly.

**Author's Note:**

> A few additional notes;
> 
>   * "We are not history yet; we are happening now. How miraculous is that?" - Welcome To Night Vale, Episode 4 (PTA Metting)
>   * Any riffs on 'an equivalent volume of spiders' inspired directly by Seanan McGuire's work.
>   * You may note this is basically Prince's Gambit, without the Kings Rising part! I'm not sure when I'll write the followup, but I appreciate your patience. Any dangling threads are a direct result of that, though I've done my best to make this work self-contained.
>   * Always happy to talk about worldbuilding and other creative choices.
>   * I was so sure I was going to write smut for this one, too. Ah well. Next time.
> 



End file.
